Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog : Photosynth Moves to Virtual Earth
Photosynth is one of the more interesting things coming out of Microsoft’s Live Labs. I saw a pretty impressive demo of the software up at Microsoft in Redmond the week before last and this will be a whole new interesting way to present your photos.
With Photosynth basically you collect a bunch of photos that you took in the same location and then use the software to match up these photos and create a sort of 3D like virtual interpretation of your 2D photographs. It’s hard to describe exactly but it gives you a far greater sense of place when all of the photos are stitched together this way.
Microsoft has a demo of Photosynth that you can check out here (sorry Mac Dude, PC only).
The interesting news out today though is that the Photosynth team at Microsoft has been moved into the Microsoft Virtual Earth group. This of course makes all the sense in the world as perhaps the most interesting way to use Photosynth longer-term will be in aggregating thousands of photographs taken by large groups of people and mapping them on a globe. Being able to take virtual tours using real life photographs as impressively as Photosynth shows today would be something very cool.
Of course to truly realize the best potential of this venture it would help if Microsoft could get their hands on a super large collection of geotagged photos out there. Hmmmm.. wasn’t there a rumor a short while back that Microsoft could end up buying Yahoo, owner of one such photo sharing property.