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Photosynth tech preview now live

I signed up for a Microsoft internal preview for employees a few weeks ago and had a play - it's amazing. Now it's your chance.

Introducing Photosynth

"The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

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."

From the Photosynth team blog:

  • Q. What does Photosynth do?
  • A. Photosynth combines hundreds or thousands of regular digital photos of a scene to present a detailed 3D model, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. The scene can be constructed regardless of whether the photos are from a single or multiple sources. It’s like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience that lets the viewer zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for a more expansive view. By viewing the photos in a 3D context you are able to get a better sense for the place where they were captured.

If you want to see what this is all about without installing anything, check out these videos. Want to know how it's all done? Read this.

Posted: Nov 09 2006, 11:25 AM by alexbarnett | with 1 comment(s)
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Comments

naterkane said:

i've been wondering for quite awhile when they were going to have an actual beta/preview of this thing. long enough that i had actually forgotten about it.

# November 9, 2006 11:34 PM