goldengod

Microsoft’s upcoming photo-browsing software Photosynth has been getting a lot of attention in the blog-o-tron lately. I’ve been interested, but skeptical. Photosynth looks gorgeous in screenshots. Unfortunately, things that look beautiful in screenshots are often brought down by poor user interfaces and slow performance.

Well, now we can find out. Microsoft’s Live Labs recently released a Photosynth tech demo. I’ve spent about 15 minutes hand-on with it and I’m impressed. The UI is simple and easy to use. The navigation is incredibly slick. Load times are less than I normally expect from Adobe’s LightRoom in Library mode.

I am suddenly a whole lot more excited about this project. If you’re not familiar with what it is, the best thing you can do is to hit up the link above and play with the demo. Microsoft has even gone so far as to make it all Firefox compatible! If you’re plugin-impaired or on an older PC, here’s a quick summary from the site:

With Photosynth you can:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
• Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

In my mind, this is a stepping stone for all kinds of technology pipe dreams. I imagine that we’ll eventually see tools to create Second Life locations from Photosynth archives. Can you imagine what this technology would be like paired with the recently released Google Street View project? It’d be nuts!

What would you do with this technology? How would you tweak it to make it do something really outrageous and useful?

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• Polar Rose - A Photo Search Engine