Photosynth- Make Panoramics

Microsoft labs recently released Photosynth, a new service available at photosynth.com . The people at Photosynth say their service "will change the way you experience and share photos."

Photosynth can transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your synth is put right in your shoes, sharing in your experience, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.

Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to build a model of where the photos were taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photo.

It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos. Photosynth is available for free at photosynth.com, where you can explore creations from users around the world and build synths of your own.

Photosynth.com enables you to experience synths contributed by other users from around the world, and to simply and easily create your own with nothing more than a few dozen photos of a place or object.

Each photo is processed by computer vision algorithms to extract hundreds of distinctive features, like the corner of a window frame or a door handle. Photos that share features are then linked together in a web. When the same feature is found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated. It's similar to depth perception - what your brain does to perceive the 3D positions of things in your field of view based on their images in both of your eyes. Photosynth's 3D model is just the cloud of points showing where those features are in space.

The Photosynth viewer shows you the 3D point cloud, but more importantly, it also shows you the original pictures overlaid on the model. Imagine a slide projector placed at each original camera position, aimed how the camera was, and projecting the picture that camera took. A screen is placed in the 3D environment at an appropriate distance from the projector. As you move around in the Photosynth environment, projectors turn on and off, giving you a changing perspective on a world built entirely out of the original photos.