Hello! Magazine

Hello!, launched in 1988 and published weekly ever since, has since become well established as a purveyor of celebrity photo-features and other aspects of photo journalism. Each issue features a mixture of articles and interviews from around the world, the range covered aimed at a very specificdemographic. Readership, in 2004, had reached almost two million UK adults, predominantly women, but nowadays the rival magazine 'OK!' out-sells Hello! by roughly three to one. Hello! is, in short, a gossip magazine. But what do Hello! readers expect from their favourite weekly?

• A Diary Of The Week offers photographic coverage of high society events, such as balls, cocktail parties, receptions, charity dinners or gallery openings. (The more cynical reader may feel 'balls' to be the most apt description of Hello! magazine's output.)
• Panorama gives an image-based review of current world events, and is the furthest Hello! strays from its celebrity features.
• Inside Story provides an insight into the daily lives of what Hello! describes as the 'rich and famous', and is usually followed up by Cinematters, which achieves the same purpose but with a more specific focus on the entertainment industry.
• Fashion and Lifestyle provide Hello! readers with an insight into 'beautiful people and beautiful clothes', as well as ensuring readers can stay up to date with cookery, interiors, beauty tips and television and film listings. Some aspects are embellished in their own Cookery and Travelsections.

Readership Details

It's obvious from looking at the contents of an average Hello! magazine that the reader is far from likely to be attending the social events covered, or to be enjoying the fine interiors the 'rich and famous' encounter on an everyday basis. Indeed, Monica Horten of the British Interactive Media Association takes a gleeful jab at Hello! with her view that 'Hello! is the sort of magazine that is read by the same audience that watches soap operas on television, and by the rest of us strictly only at the hairdressers or in the dentist's waiting room'. Continuing with an assertion that 'the intellectual level is not high', Ms. Horten clearly has her finger on the pulse.

Hello! Magazine itself is more specific about its readership, of which 82% are women, though it's far more flattering, clearly believing its readers to be a high-class, discerning clientele as opposed to gossip-starved soap-addicts. Amongst other things, Hello! are pleased to note that:

• Readers of Hello! are 71% more likely than the average female to choose a car mainly on looks.
• Hello! readers are willing and able to spend money on fulfilling their desires. In the last 12 months its readers have apparently spent over sixty-four million pounds on microwave ovens.
• 91% of Hello! readers enjoy an alcoholic drink.
• Hello! readers spend nearly 93 million pounds on food every week.

Miscellany

The Hello! website offers one or two other titbits which, while not earth-shatteringly interesting, are worth a mention.

• Hello! magazine is printed at Polestar Greaves in Scarborough, UK. (Gravure, if you're into technicalities.)
• According to a recent survey, Hello! readers perceive themselves as upmarket, eschewing other magazines of a similar nature, such as OK! magazine.

The Curse Of Hello!

It is well known that Hello! pay good money for exclusive photocoverage of celebrity weddings. It has been noticed that a large proportion of such weddings break up extremely quickly, an effect known, jokingly, as 'the curse of Hello!'. Some kind of official study needs to be done...

Photosynth

Photosynth is a relatively new application from Microsoft Live Labs which takes a group of related photographs and analyses them to produce what they call a 'three-dimensional point cloud' of a photographed object or scene. Following that, the Photosynth browser plug-in allows one to view the object from any angle, limited only by the quality of the photographs and the extent to which they overlap.

Which all sounds very interesting. It basically means that you can move through a Photosynthed scene to see the photos from any angle, or to zoom in on areas of interest. You can see the actual position from which a photograph was taken, or look for the same scene from a slightly different position. Furthermore, because it's an online application, anyone can use it... or that's the theory, anyway.

Practically speaking, at present Photosynths can only be created on Windows Vista or Windows XP. Using Silverlight, anyone can view them, provided they're willing to install Silverlight. Perhaps one day there'll be true Mac or Linux support, but this is Microsoft Live Labs - why would it ship for anything other than Windows? Why would it embrace HTML5, or even, at a push, Flash?

Regardless; there are two stages to the Photosynth experience. Uploading and analysis is the first step. Your set of photographs are subjected to an algorithm that matches points of interest. Little chunks of image which appear in a range of photographs are matched up, and the program uses this to calculate the three-dimensional relationship between the images. Angles, distances, perspective - it's all put together into a 3D scene. They call it bundle adjustment, though it might as well be called reticulating splines for all I know, and in fact that might have been geekily amusing, had they thought of it. 'Bundle adjustment' sounds good, however, and once you've completed this one-off, rather computationally-demanding process, you can move on to step two. This is where the 3D point cloud is navigated using the Photosynth Viewer. The server stores the original photographs, and the client does the displaying and requesting. Natively, if you're a Windows user, and via the delights of Silverlight if you're not.

So, after reading all about it, looking at the comments on slashdot and the videos on YouTube, curiosity got the better of me. I played around for a short while and never quite got round to uploading my own photographs. It was interesting, and I had a bit of fun getting lost on the outskirts of the Taj Mahal, but in the end it was all rather underwhelming, considering the hype. At the moment, I feel there's more excitement imagining the underlying technology than actually using it; it takes me back to the days of finally managing to get the library to order The Science Of Fractal Images for me, or Martin Gardner's mathematical recreation columns. Maybe when there's a Mac version, I'll have another go, but at the moment it's not really worth rebooting into Windows for, let alone selling out and installing Silverlight.

http://photosynth.net/, if you're interested. Despite the amazing concept, I'm nearly ashamed to admit that I'm clearly not.