Microsoft Releases Photosynth

Spy Hunter writes "Photosynth has graduated from a 'tech preview' to a complete service. Now you can upload your own photos and have them automatically transformed into a 'synth': a 3D fly-through reconstruction of your home, your vacation, or anything else you can take pictures of. Learn more about Photosynth at the official blog, see what Walt Mossberg has to say about it, or just go try it out right now." According to Mossberg, Photosynth works on PCs using IE or Firefox, but not yet on Macs. We've been discussing Photosynth since its introduction.

Ego

[xaositects]

"Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet."

Those zippy cool mac ads seemed to have hurt Microsoft's ego a little. maybe... maybe it's a ruse... a false modesty sort of thing...

Re:Ego

[sconeu]

Those zippy cool mac ads seemed to have hurt Microsoft's ego a little. maybe

A fact that has not gone unnoticed at Ubersoft [ubersoft.net].

Re:Req's

[mccalli]

Operating System: Only Windows XP (SP2 or SP3) and Windows Vista are supported at this time. Running Windows on a Mac? Photosynth runs under Boot Camp only. Parallels and other VM software cannot run the viewer.

A posting, with video, on the VMware Fusion blog [vmware.com] begs to differ. You do need to be running VMware Fusion 2 latest beta though.

Cheers,
Ian

I'm going to wear out the shutter on my camera

[TibbonZero]

I dunno about you guys, but I'm pretty stoked that this technology has come to see the light of day for people to input their own photos. It's like Google Street View, but with anywhere and any camera.

My main concern is that MSFT has stated that they'd love to basically stitch every photo together into a virtual world nearly (not quite, but close). I don't normally have privacy concerns and issues, but this 'could' potentially get a little funny. Do I really want to photosynth my apartment or desk at work and then have that linked locationally to the rest of the world? I'm not so sure.

Re:Not actually 3D?

[Locutus]

I could only see the one Flash demo which runs on their homepage but no other views work without Windows. Having seen that, it looks like they took existing techniques for stitching together pictures and added a dynamic capability to that. Cool but not really a brand new concept. Photo stitching software has been around for 10 or more years.

So they get 5 points for taking existing tech, making it look like a new web technology, and create another Windows-only technology in todays mix of browsers and computing devices. yawn.

LoB

Flash huh?

[twistah]

So, anyone find it interesting that this is written in Flash and not Silverlight?