Get ready to create 3D virtual worlds with your photos using Microsoft Photosynth

Posted on October 4, 2007 at 12:18 pm

If you haven’t already heard, Microsoft Live Labs has been developing a very cool web application called Photosynth that will takes a large collection of your personal photos of a place or object, analyze them for similarities, and then display a reconstructed three-dimensional model of the space.

If that sounds cool, you’re right! Currently the software is in tech preview mode, which means you can try it out with the collection of pictures they provide, but you can’t yet use it on your own photos.

I wanted to write about Photosynth because it’s good to know this before you go on a trip and then find out you should have taken more pictures! So if you’re heading to Vegas or to Hawaii, be sure to take a few 360 degree pictures of a great location. Also, make sure the pictures overlap a little bit as you move around in a circle so that Photosynth will be able to tell which picture connects to the next.

As the Microsoft teams puts it on their web site:

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

You can try out the tech preview yourself by going to the site and installing the small app. If not, I went ahead and played around with it and also recorded a video of it so you can see what what Photosynth is all about.

Here’s an example of the Piazza San Marco with it’s main attractions being the Basilica of St. Mark, the Doge’s Palace, and the Campanile. If you’ve been to this place before, you should enjoy it!