Photosynth: Map Photos into Virtual Spaces

On Friday we got our first peek at a product coming out of Microsoft's Live Labs, the Gary Flake-run research arm in MSN. They have released a video of a new photo app called PhotoSynth. The product in it's current form will debut at SIGGRAPH and will be released later this year (current plan).
 

Their site has a pretty good description of the new software:

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. With Photosynth you can:

Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.

Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph 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.

Explore a custom tour.

Send a collection to a friend.

Photosynth uses the imaging technology that was obtained during the acquisition of Seadragon Software. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the Photosynth architect, was the founder of Seadragon. This is a really cool looking piece of technology and one that I can't wait to apply to my recent China photos. You can see more of the software on Channel 9.

The main video gives us a picture of who works on the Live Labs' projects. Gary makes a real point of showing how his new org is pulling resources from across MS to work together. Microsoft has always had an issue with harnessing the work in MSR; this seems like a real step forward for them.

(This entry was written by Brady, who was unable to post it himself before going offline last night because of problems with our MT installation, just now resolved.)