Microsoft Photosynth Goes Live

Shaon published 21 Aug 2008, 15:10 in main - 343 views

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Microsoft on Wednesday opened up its Photosynth 3D photo offering to the public.

Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs them in a 3D environment. It could take Flickr photos of a monument like Notre Dame Cathedral from hundreds of separate accounts and compile them into one, continuous shot of the cathedral and its surroundings.

Users can install Photosynth at photosynth.com. All photos that are added to the site will be public and visible to anyone on the Internet. It is currently only available on Windows-based machines running XP and Vista, and users will have to sign up for a Windows Live ID to access Photosynth.

Microsoft first previewed Photosynth at its 2006 financial analyst meeting, several months after it acquired Seattle-based Seadragon Software, which developed technology to display large images on computers and handheld devices. Microsoft later previewed a more in-depth look at last year's TED conference.

It is "creating hyperlinks between images and it's doing that based on the content inside of the images," Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, said during his TED presentation. "When you do a web search for images, you type in phrases and the text on the web page is carrying lots of information [about that photograph]. What if that picture links to your pictures" via Photosynth?

"This is something that grows in complexity as people use it," he said. "Your own photos are getting tagged with metadata."

The Photosynth Web site includes a photography guide for those just getting stated as well as a downloadable video that demonstrates how to synch.

"Because Photosynth is so new, you will probably run into an occasional bug or hiccup," the Live Labs team warned in a blog post. "Whether you have a brilliant idea or find a bug, please let us know. We'll do our best to address them."

Copyright © 2008 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc.