Before this Bank Holiday weekend I was invited by Microsoft to a preview of Photosynth, a new way of combing pictures into a 3D world which is then hosted online. Photosynth also uses the ‘Deep Zoom’ technology which is in Sliverlight that I have written about in this month’s issue. The trick to creating a good ’synth’ is apparently to make sure that your photos overlap and also take photos of any detailed areas that you might what users to zoom in on.

Over the Bank Holiday weekend I attended the ‘NATS’ which is a huge gathering of modded cars, both American and old skool UK cars. I thought that this might be a great opportunity to try my efforts at making a Photosynth.

My first effort was not brilliant as I only achieved 11% ’sythy’ which means there was not enough common areas for the software to use to link together. I am going to do some more experiments and upload them later but as my first effort took seven hours to render and then failed to upload fully and had to be restarted, it my be sometime before I get any better results!

If you want to take a look then go to http://www.photosynth.com and do a search for NATS or mark_newton.

Oh and the record breaking ? Well as I said earlier, at the weekend my partner and I attended the NATS Hot Rod and Custom car show in Ipswich with my 1966 Mustang Convertible, and we took part in the cruise down to the seaside resort of Felixstowe. This has always been a large and fun cruise. The previous record of the most number of cars on a single cruise was held by the Americans with some 420 cars. We manged over 620! The record was officially recorded by the people from the Guinness book of records. So not quite an Olympic medal, but a great way to spend the weekend.

I will be covering more about this in my next article in the magazine.