Microsoft Launches Photosynth: Your Pictures in 3D

Microsoft has publicly launched Photosynth, its long awaited Live Labs product that allows you to stitch your photos together to create a detailed 3D environment.  While most of the computation is done on your desktop, the images are uploaded to Microsoft's servers and Microsoft is giving all Photosynth users a total of 20GB of storage for their collections. The rendering and browsing is done with the help of Seadragon, another Live Labs product

When Microsoft first publicly showed a demo of Photosynth in 2006, it almost looked too good to be true. Now, getting started with it couldn't be easier - as long as you have a Windows machine - there is no Mac version available yet. You first have to install both a browser plug-in and a desktop application (all done through just one installer). The installation is standard it finishes in less than a minute. There is no problem with the plugin for both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7.

One interesting aspect of the uploader is that you can choose a license for your creation.

The desktop application does most of the heavy lifting for creating the 'synths' and seemed to make good use of all available cores. You only have to pick your photos, give your collection and name and click 'Synth.' After it has finished, it will create a score telling you how 'synthy' your photo collection was. Obviously, your photos need to have common areas for Photosynth to be able to stitch them together.

The online viewer is quite intuitive and allows you to zoom in and out, move around the picture and also go through the pictures in a 3D slide show mode. One nice feature is that you can also go full screen, which is really the best way to showcase your photos.

You can also embed a copy of your synth on any website and email a link to your friends.

The animation in Photosynth is very smooth and our screenshots really can't do it justice.

It really takes a different approach to shooting pictures to make the most out of Photosynth. If you often stitch together photos, you are probably already used to this, but Photosynth also gives you more freedom, as you can zoom in and out, or walk around an object and still have Photosynth recognize the common areas.

It is recommended that you have a set of at least 10 to 20 photos to create an interesting 'synth' and the more photos you have, the more interesting it will be.