This semester we asked a hundred freshmen in separate Cornerstone sections to take photos that included the Jacob’s Dream angels. Our object was to illustrate the way disciplines in the liberal arts attempt to provide a more complete view of the human and our relation to the divine.

Once uploaded to Photosynth, the students’ photos were combined into a “synth” which is a 3-D construction of the Jacob’s Dream site based on the many facets of the space captured in the photos. We then shot the space again, attempting to produce a careful survey of the site.

In his Cornerstone Spotlight presentation yesterday, Dr. Greg Straughn paralleled this first example with crowd-sourced initiatives that can leverage the wisdom of the group but sometimes without a coordinated plan or design. Scholarly research often approximates the second example that leveraged higher-powered tools (wide-angle and telephoto lenses) and moved around the site to create a greater degree of coverage.

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Getting Started with Photosynth

To explore each synth further, enter by selecting “Click to View” and then the full screen button in the bottom right. From there, explore each of the main views: the 3D View, the Overhead View, and the Point Cloud View. Thanks again to the students who contributed a nice range of images.

(Photosynth utilizes the Silverlight plugin developed by Microsoft and the following examples are not currently compatible with mobile devices.)

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Cornerstone Students – 172 photos (mostly phone photos)

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Single Photographer – 252 photos (Canon 5D, 24-70mm / 70-200mm lenses)