Photosynth tech preview is impressive

Microsoft Research has pushed out some questionable stuff in the past, but I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Microsoft maintaining a world-renowned R&D group that hearkens back to the days when Xerox did the same thing. And even if not everything they generate is a gem, sometimes they produce something that you can't help but look at, and say "wow". Photosynth is that sort of product.

Not yet commercially available, this is simply a technical preview, but one that is well worth your time to play with. The basic idea behind Photosynth is that it can take a set of photographs and analyze them for graphical similarities, then use the resulting data set to reconstruct a 3-dimensional space with the images mapped onto it. While that's a relatively decent description of what it does, you really can't understand Photosynth until you see it (and play with it) in action.

The technical preview site offers four locations to explore: Gary Faigin Studio, Piazza San Marco in Venice, Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and Piazza San Pietro in Rome. While the outdoor locations are impressive as expected, I was pleasantly surprised by the experience of wandering through an art studio using this software.

It might not be immediately apparent, but the photographs used for this project are extremely high-resolution, so you will find that you can zoom way in and see some pretty impressive details. Zooming out provides you with the context of the entire environment, which is somehow reassuring. In some ways, it reminds me of the incredible demonstration given by Jeff Han at TedTalks - when I imagine exploring Photosynth with a user interface like the one Jeff has developed, I want the future to be now.

One disclaimer - to play with Photosynth, you'll need to use Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and install the ActiveX component that does the heavy lifting. It's not clear to me that this needed to be done in a browser, but at the same time it doesn't take anything away from the experience having it there.

Tags: 3D mapping, 3dMapping, freeware, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, MicrosoftResearch, news, Photo analysis, PhotoAnalysis, Photosynth, timewasters