Years ago, Microsoft released previews of a technology called Photosynth that takes photos of a place and builds a pseudo-3D model of it.  You can navigate around in 3D and view the photos from that angle.

One of the problems with the technology are things that aren’t the same in all pictures.  For example if you took 100 pictures of a monument from all different angles, that would be an ideal subject for Photosynth, but if there were tourists in the photos that would confuse it because they’re in some photos but not others, and they move around between photos.

Photosynth looked really interesting and I was very excited to try it out, but apart from periodically updating the previews, nothing was released.

And then out of the blue, a few days ago they released it!

I’m eager to try it out, but I don’t have a lot of photos of one subject to use.  If I ever get around to it I’ll post the results here.

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