The return of Photosynth

I’ve been a little preoccupied lately and have had trouble getting anything done on Fotohacker, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity to talk about the second coming of Photosynth, the spacial photography browser being developed by some folks over at Microsoft.

Photosynth is a product being worked on by Microsoft Live Labs, and about two years ago they unveiled a tech demo upon the world which got everyone excited. In a nutshell, the application gathers photos from a source and using an advanced set of algorithms it creates paths between these photos allowing you to browse around geographically local environments, almost like a 3D virtual world. It was really cool, but now they’ve gone and outdone themselves.

The next generation of Photosynth (which technically really hasn’t had a generation yet since it’s unreleased) employs even more techniques to smooth the transition between photographs, including color correction and steadying effects. Here’s a video of it at work…

Now all they need to do is combine this application with a rich source of photographs, like Flickr or Pbase, and they might really have something. Maybe this is why Microsoft has been so persistent with their desire to acquire Yahoo (owners of Flickr) lately. One thing’s for sure – Microsoft really doesn’t have a great photo service of their own to draw from, at least not yet, but when they do – Photosynth will surely try to take advantage of it.