April 23rd, 2007
Stunning Microsoft Labs Photosynth preview
Microsoft Live Labs now has a working preview of its Photosynth technology (technology overview and Video). The preview initially worked only for newer versions of Internet Explorer, but now there's apparently a Firefox plugin for it as well. It works only on Windows XP SP2 and Vista at this time. If you're using IE6, IE7, or Firefox 1.5 or 2.0, and you have a video card that meets Vista Aero requirements, you can go to this gallery of working Photosynth previews. If you haven't seen this live demo yet, don't miss it. It takes photograph viewing to a whole new level and adds positional context to your static images. You get to fly around in 3D space and transition seamlessly between images.
Future possibilities include the ability to crawl the Web for related photos. Maybe some day, when digital cameras have GPS units built into them and they can put in GPS data about position, direction, and other information, this could be integrated with some kind of Google Earth-like application.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
