The folks at Microsoft never sleep, or so it seems. Now featured on the Live Labs website is Photosynth, a new application that claims to change forever the way we think about digital photos. From the website, with Photosynth you can:
- Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
- Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
- See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
- Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
- Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.
Wow, I am intrigued. Reading on, you learn that Photosynth maps every photo in 3D and extracts distinctive features, then compares each photo. This allows you to take a traditional set of 2D photos, and transform them to a 3D walkthrough of just about anything. Imagine what this will do to your eBay photos and sales percentages!
Microsoft recently purchased a company called Seadragon - whose base technology is featured in this product. Directly from Seadragon is a zoom feature - Photosynth will allow you to zoom and pan over any image directly - with an autofocus feature.
The site does warn that you need a newer graphics system, and must set graphics acceleration on your PC to full for it to work. A "Technology Preview" (one step shy of a beta) is available on this site for download.
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