Photosynth

I have a feeling Photosynth got a LOT of views today, because cnn.com featured it on their front page. That's how I found it. cnn.com did a really cool project where people could submit their digital photos of the Presidential Inauguration to cnn and the photos were assembled into an interactive 3D view thing. This really cool technology was powered by Photosynth, a project of Microsoft Live Labs, and is viewable at CNN's The Moment. After I saw and played with this for a while, I tried my own Synth, as Microsoft calls it. Sadly, the program only runs in Windows, but it works great using Parallels. Here's a tour of my dorm room...sorry for not having a more original topic, but it was available. Enjoy. Silverlight is required for viewing it on a Mac, or a PC without the software.

It's really easy to make these. All that's involved is taking a lot of pictures that overlap, then you just select the folder with the pictures, and tell the program to do its magic. Very neat technology. In addition to being very cool, I could easily see it being used to sell homes, etc. My results weren't quite what I was hoping for, with the photos I took of the chair in the middle of the room and some detail shots, especially of the Muse poster, but the basic circling the room worked pretty well.