Redmond (WA) - Photosynth has been one of Microsoft most creative consumer projects in some time. Developed by the company in collaboration with scientists from the Graphics and Imaging Lab (GRAIL) at the University of Washington, the technology - previously also known "Photo Tourism" - uses a number of pictures to create a sketch of a three-dimensional landscape filled with high-resolution images: Upload your pictures and you could end up with a dramatic 3D world. Conceivably, Photosynth could easily be imagined to be one evolutionary step above Google’s Street View Maps feature.

Photosynth has been in development for several years, prototype applications have been available for more than a year. Now Microsoft believes the application is ready for prime time. The new service, available through an 8.2 MB browser plug-in uses a series of at least a few dozen photos of a certain location, analyzes each photo for similarities in other shots to create overlaps and end up with a virtual environment. For example, you may have taken a few dozen images of New York’s Central Park or Eiffel’s Tower in Paris. When you arrive home, you upload your photos and let Photosynth take care of the rest.

Microsoft says Photosynth is an entirely new medium. "Think about the times you have been in the midst of a beautiful location or having an once-in-a-lifetime experience and wished you could share it with more immediacy and sense of place than still photos or video can capture," the company said. "Photosynth puts viewers in the center of the moment and in control of how they experience it."

In a certain way, the environments Photosynth comes up with is very comparable to what is delivered by panorama features that are, for example available in Photoshop. What makes Photosynth different is that sheer amount of data that is stitched together. While even higher-end mainstream PCs can be brought down to their knees by stitching just ten high-resolution pictures together, Photosynth scenes can consist of hundreds of pictures.

Once uploaded, analyzed and released, a viewer can rotate a "synth" in 360 degrees; look up or down, pan from left to right, zoom in, or pull back to reveal the full sense of the location. From the viewer’s perspective, Photosynth creates unique sense of being there and the ability to put a meaning to seemingly unrelated series of photos. Photos are stitched effectively to create 3D model, which, for example, enables a user to rotate a scene of New York’s Central Park and zoom in on a dotted park bench model with an actual bench photo stitched over it. You can click on a photo to view it full screen, and zoom in to reveal greater detail.

There is also an option to view all photos as a series of thumbnail tiles. What is remarkable is that, despite gigabytes of image data, Photosynth can smoothly zoom into a photo as deep as the resolution allows with almost no network lag, assuming you are on broadband connection. This is achieved with another Live Labs technology dubbed Seadragon that is also partially integrated into Silverlight. According to Microsoft, Seadragon enables visual information to be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices.

Users can share their synth with other users on their blogs, home page, and profiles on social networking sites.

It is does not take much that Microsoft has a technology on its hands that could have a massive impact on cartography and preserving historical data. It is easily one of the most impressive ways to take advantage of the huge amounts of image data created in today’s world. The possibilities how to use this data are endless - and could, for example, end up in map applications. No doubt about it, this is one of the most ingenious emotional application we have seen come out of Microsoft in a long time.