For this project, I picked an area up my upstairs office that was nestled between some built in shelves and cabinets on one wall.  It measured 48 inches wide by 33 inchess tall.

Next I went to my favorite free high resolution desktop wallpaper sites, and looked for something that I wanted to see on my wall.  I wanted to find something that included obvious perspective cues to give the illusion of depth, and seemed to have a light source in the middle of the picture where my lamp was going to be shining from.  I picked this one without over-thinking it too much for the purposes of the experiment.  Many others would have worked, and been much more interesting.  I downloaded it at the highest resolution offered (2,560 x 1,600 pixels).

In order to know how my photo would look, I divided the number of pixels I had wide by inches wide (2,560 pixels/48 inches) = 53 DPI (dots per inch).  For a section of wall that people will be at least 1-3 feet away from, 50 DPI is fine.  100 DPI is good if people will get less than a foot away at eye level to your wall.  This requires less DPI than other printing applications in order  to look good from the distance a viewer sees it.

Next I went to an online printing place to have it printed large.  I went to BargainBanners.com, (my employer), here.   My wallpaper printout arrived well within a week.

When it arrived, I thumb-tacked it to the wall under where the trim was attached.

Since there is a lamp that goes on that part of the shelf, I set it up without its shade to preview how the room’s real lighting would work with the image.  Looks like the bulb is practically part of the sky.  Exactly the effect I was hoping for.

Wood trim, lampshade, and various office junk put back into place.  I’m pretty happy with how it turned out for a first try.  What does everyone else think?  I have more complicated wood paneling elsewhere in the house.  I was thinking of trying something more complex, with a more meaningful image, in the future.

Regarding the copyright of the image, that part is sticky.  I believe it would be a better practice to surf on over to iStockPhoto.com to buy the proper rights to an image they have for $5-$12.  Better yet, if you have a camera with a lot of megapixels, you can print directly from your photographs, which you already own.  My employer sees a lot of this for beautiful engagement photos on huge display at the wedding reception.

Well, almost.

Naturally I’m referring to Microsoft’s newly-made-live-and-public PhotoSynth technology with the freshly added ability to create your own PhotoSynth content.

Now PhotoSynths are NOT the same thing as your old school, late 90s virtual tour animated photo panoramas.

In the below YouTube video, you can see a screencast I filmed of a tour through a PhotoSynth I created of my home in Dallas:

By going around my house and taking 322 individual photographs, and uploading them into the new Microsoft PhotoSynth creator, I had hoped to create a complete 3D tour of my home that I could show people (family members) in distant areas in order to share my home with them. Although far better than hearing a description of the phone over the phone, or seeing just a few still photos, it wasn’t completely immersive.

Even though I followed the Microsoft PhotoSynth guidelines fairly well (or so I thought), the panorama that my photos allowed the system to create were about 18% ‘connectable’ according to the system. Did I take the photos poorly? Would it work better with a wide-angle, higher resolution camera? Does the software need 100,000 people like me to upload data so that they can improve the algorithm for detecting how pictures fit together?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Please view the video to see how it turned out, and visit Microsoft PhotoSynth to try it out for yourself. They have created tours of places far more interesting than my house in north Dallas, Texas.

On the plus side, for the first time my grandma in California really seemed to understand how the parts of my house connected together and the layout of the space. Previously she had see a few still photos, and hadn’t really visualized what it was like to be here. So even my simple effort actually achieved what I had hoped it would. It is very sophisticated computer graphics technology, and has been adapted to be very user friendly. No doubt, they have already taken this far beyond what has been released to the likes of us.

You can see what I made here on the PhotoSynth website. (Please note: to view the synth directly, you’ll be prompted to install the MS PhotoSynth viewer software. Just view the demonstration I uploaded to YouTube instead if you don’t want to install any software.)

Seth Godin (the marketing book author and fervent blogger) has always had plenty of interesting stuff to say. His recent post on how to effectively help create a mini-meritocracy to sort through finalist candidates for a hiring process using web tools like FaceBook groups and BaseCamp projects was fascinating. Having a batch of potential recruits ‘fight’ it out by cooperating best via online collaboration tools would naturally see a quick stratification of ability. As we develop better hiring processes within our own company, I can see trying this method out in various forms very soon.

"It was absolutely fascinating. Within a day, the group had divided into four camps:

• The game-show contestants, quick on the trigger, who were searching for a quick yes or no. Most of them left.
• The lurkers. They were there, but we couldn’t tell.
• The followers. They waited for someone to tell them what to do.
• The leaders. A few started conversations, directed initiatives and got to work.

Want to guess who I hired? (It was a paid gig and five ended up spending time with me in NY on a somewhat rolling basis). If you’re hiring for people to work online, I can’t imagine not screening people in this way. This is the work, and you can watch people do it for real before you hire them." from Seth Godin’s Blog