It’s no secret that those futuristic demos at the Consumer Electronics Show each year don’t always turn into real, live products. But when Microsoft showed a working version of the “GroupShot” photo-editing tool at CES last year, there seemed little doubt that it would be released as promised as part of the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras program.
That’s not how it turned out. More than a year later, GroupShot hasn’t yet been released as an Ultimate Extra. As explained in this story in today’s newspaper, that’s one of the ways that the Ultimate Extras initiative has fallen short of original expectations. But what happened to GroupShot, in particular? I asked Microsoft’s Barry Goffe that question when I spoke with him for the story.
“The thing that we showed at CES was real, live code … but it wasn’t really up to snuff, it wasn’t something that I would have felt good about shipping to millions of customers,” Goffe said. The company had to make “some tough choices, and one of the choices was we’re not going to ship that one right away — it was too much work to get it out.” He said the company may still decide to ship it as an Ultimate Extra in the future.
A version of GroupShot, from Microsoft Research, is available for download on this site. [See correction below.] It takes similar photos and assembles them into a composite image that reflects the best qualities of each.
See today’s story for more on the Ultimate Extras initiative.
Correction: As noted by reader “Kubla Kant” below, the program is actually no longer available for download. The download link on the GroupShot page leads to a page that says the beta period has expired, although they’re “currently considering several options” to bring it back.
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