New App Useful for Marketing Research - PhotoSynth’s may be worth more than a thousand words
I’ve been playing with a new iPhone app by Microsoft called PhotoSynth for the last few months. I often see researchers online mention new apps and how they may be useful for marketing research, but more often than not these free tools are not worth the ROI in terms of time to implement vs. the insights they provide.
PhotoSynth though (and there are a couple of other tools like it), definitely seem like they would be immediately useful for anyone doing ethnographic research. They’re also relatively fun and easy to use.
To get an idea of what it does, check out the PhotoSynth I took very quickly from the pool at the St Regis in Puerto Rico last week (it’s definitely not one of my better Synths).
Depending on how much time you spend, and the quality of your camera, these 360×2 degree interactive photographs can be quite detailed allowing you to not only pan sideways, up and down, but also to zoom in.
I didn’t spend much time taking the one above, and it was all taken from one single position (it’s usually better if you take shots from multiple positions. What you will also quickly notice about my PhotoSynth is that it’s a bit choppy. This is in part because the math inside the software works better with more linear visuals. Clouds, palms blowing in the wind, people moving around, the complicated curvature of the St. Regis pool and especially water with its ever changing reflections make it difficult for the software to stitch the shots into one coherent image.
One of many research applications I could think of would be asking respondents to take Synths of their homes, TV rooms, cars, kitchens etc. Thinking of our own work with college students (GenX2Z) we’ve previously asked students to take shots of their dorm rooms. Instructions though are followed with various degrees of accuracy. Some students have been good about taking shots from several angles, others tend to focus on what they find most interesting (TV, bed etc.). While self direction does have some insight value, a PhotoSynth would encourage respondents to take pictures of the entire room and allow the researchers to see everything and then zoom-in to identify products etc.
While beaches and other scenery are the most popular PhotoSynth genre, searching the shared database on PhotoSynth.net I did in fact find 16,641 results of “dorm room”! They vary in terms of quality, here are a few:
I think this type of technology represents a new type of media mining opportunity that goes beyond what our current data and even text mining offer. We will soon need to incorporate image and video visualization and filtering techniques as well.
@TomHCAnderson
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Cindy Dyer // Nov 21, 2011 at 6:24 pm
I really like the possibility of this type of app. If your respondent has a smartphone, this should be relatively simple to use and provide some great “in the moment” information.
2 Cam Davis // Nov 29, 2011 at 8:32 pm
Interesting app. What impressed me was the zoom in feature where you could read the small print on things posted on the wall and scribblings on the calendar. I guess once you are in a dorm, there is NO privacy! If we do this in my office, all my posted notes with my passwords would be in public domain. Perhaps, this app suggests that I should clean up my clutter if I take inside pics or anyone else should for that matter.
3 Tom H C Anderson // Nov 30, 2011 at 7:56 pm
@Cam the messier a person is the more you can tell about them
Don’t worry, my desk is rarely neat. I keep things organized in my head
4 Nate Lawrence // Dec 19, 2011 at 6:29 pm
Hello, Tom,
A distinction that needs to be made is that Photosynth’s website currently is host to two different photography constructs/formats (and more next year http://bit.ly/spinmovies ). The current two are photosynths and panoramas and they are not the same thing.
In your post above, you have embedded five panoramas, but no photosynths.
You also mention “it’s usually better if you take shots from multiple positions”. This is excellent advice for shooting photosynths, but the worst advice possible for shooting panoramas.
This is because panoramas are created using 2D stitching, but photosynths are created using 3D stitching.
Here is a YouTube playlist in which several different panorama app creators will all tell you that to shoot good panoramas, you ought to keep the camera’s lens as close to the same spot in the air as humanly possible and pivot the camera around its lens. http://bit.ly/howtopano
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On Windows you can use Photosynth’s Windows app to create photosynths and, alternately, use Microsoft ICE ( http://bit.ly/microsoftice ) or Adobe Photoshop ( http://bit.ly/pstops ) to stitch panoramas to then upload via the Photosynth app for Windows.
Photosynth’s mobile app for phones, however, is (currently) only capable of creating panoramas.
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If you’re using the mobile phone app, you currently only have the option to shoot panoramas, so just remember to move the phone as little as possible while turning it.
If you’re shooting photos with any camera to then create either a panorama or a photosynth on Windows, you should decide what you want to share.
If sharing the view from a single point of view is all you have time/patience for, then follow the panorama shooting advice above (i.e. don’t hold the camera at arms’ length and swing it around you) and then stitch and upload it with ICE.
If you want to make a sparse 3D point cloud of an object (perhaps a tree) or a room (perhaps your kitchen or living room in its resplendent holiday decor) and provide a way to move among photos of different objects in the room as though your audience were really visiting, then follow Photosynth’s shooting guidelines http://photosynth.net/help.aspx#photosynthhelp (there are limits to their matching’s abilities, but they are easy limits to stay within) and go for gold.
Here’s a photosynth of mine that demonstrates the easiest to utilize methods for beginners to use from the Photosynth Photography Guide: http://bit.ly/orbitalsynth
iOS users can download the unofficial iSynth app http://bit.ly/isynth and then search within the app for ‘Orbital Propulsion’ by Nathanael to view the synth, minus the ability to zoom in to the full resolution photos.
5 Tom H C Anderson // Dec 20, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Thank you Nate!
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