Share your Italian photos with Photosynth

Here is an exciting technology that will help you bring to life hundreds of photos of Italy and convert them into an immersive interactive online experience.

Microsoft has finally publicly released Photosynth, an online application that has the ability to reconstruct scenes or objects from a bunch of flat photographs.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, Photosynth recreates the space and uses it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

As a Microsoft employee I had a chance to play with Photosynth long time ago. But other than generically blogging about it, I couldn't really share any specific details.
Now that Photosynth is public domain, I encourage you to take a closer look at it and try to "synth" some of your own photos. The first time you visit the site, you'll need to download and install a special plugin for your browser (Windows PC only).

- Microsoft Photosynth web site
- How to introductory video
- Various user generated synths of Italy

Microsoft Photosynth: turning photos into 3D spaces

Microsoft Live Labs has released today a preview of a new media technology called Photosynth. What it does is reconstructing 3D spaces from photo collections created by different people about the same subject. You can zoom in/out, pan, view scenes from different angles.
Two of the examples on the Photosynth site are about Piazza San Marco in Venice and Piazza San Pietro in Rome. The application is really impressive. I don't just say that because I work for Microsoft; this is really a must see technology preview if you are into travel and photography (requires a broadband connection).
If you leave your comments here, I'll make sure to pass them along to the Photosynth folks.