Microsoft’s Live Labs developed Photosynth using its own SeaDragon technology. The service allows the user to upload images and then fuses them together to make 3D environments that you can navigate in a format similar to the Street View feature on Google Maps. They’re providing users with 20GB of free space for images.

The release has opened to mixed reviews. The biggest complaint is that the service is so far only compatible with PCs and not with Macs. This morning a Twitterer pointed out the error message it displays: "Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet".

Most who actually get to use it, however, seem fairly impressed. "Photosynth is a great piece of tech. I’d be willing to pay up to $1000 for a standalone app I can grab pointcloud data from," says another Twitterer.

NASA and National Geographic are among those who have had the pleasure of testing it and have uploaded some pretty impressive projects. These showcase the possibilities of using Photosynth in a pretty cool way.

An Entirely New Medium

Microsoft touts synths (the resulting products of using Photosynth) as "an entirely new medium" encouraging users to share experiences, tell stories, form communities, and educate or archive. Check out Microsoft’s release for more details on these aspects of Photosynth.

Photosynth is obviously in its early stages, and Microsoft has big plans for its future. "Following this release, the Photosynth team will join MSN – an important step in continuing to improve Photosynth and share the experience with an even wider audience," the company says. "Over the next year Photosynth will begin to become a key part of the experience for MSN’s 550 million monthly visitors worldwide. Synths will be prominently featured on MSN.com."

It should be interesting to see where Microsoft goes with this. Perhaps they should incorporate synths into their new Seinfeld ad campaign. For more on the creation of Photosynth, PCWorld has a video interview with the co-creator.

These display “four different aspects of the Shuttle’s lifecycle as never before seen,” according to Microsoft’s NASA Collections page, and I can’t argue with that statement.

Yet for those of you whose memories might be a little fuzzy, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, made a statement that quickly sums up the accomplishment: “With Photosynth, we take pictures of an environment and knit them together into an experience that people can move through like a 3-D video game.”

In a press release, he then continued, “NASA provided us with some outstanding images and the result is an experience that will wow anyone wanting to get a closer look at the Endeavour and its travels.”

A positive response to this display could speed up Photosynth’s development – since the technology was first demonstrated in mid-2006, that’s been a rather quiet front.  Then again, Greg Sterling notes that some things have been happening lately, including a Photosynth collaboration with the BBC.

“While the Photosynth imagery is very interesting it may strike many people as simply novel or fun,” Sterling later adds.  “But it should be seen in the context of other developments, including Google Earth and StreetView, as part of an evolution toward a much more visual, much more ‘immersive’ and ‘dimensional’ Internet – the so-called ‘3-D Internet.’”

Microsoft Releases Deepfish for Windows Mobile

We’ve seen Microsoft suffer from The Fear in the browser wars already. Once upon a time, Netscape dominated the PC browser market. Until Marc Andreessen and company were so close to Bill Gates that they were scraping the UV coating off his glasses, Microsoft had expressed minimal interest in the World Wide Web.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer owns some 80-plus percent of the browser market now. Netscape is a news sharing website and Andreessen bounces from venture to venture. The Netscape browser exists, but doesn’t come up in conversation except in retrospect these days.

Now it looks like Opera’s turn to face the still-dangerous Borg of Redmond. Microsoft’s Deepfish browser arrived on the company’s on10.net site, as noted by Larry Larsen. Deepfish comes from Microsoft’s Live Labs, where it has been equipped with technology from their Seadragon and PhotoSynth projects.

Unlike most Internet competitors in the mobile space, Microsoft’s deals with mobile makers go straight to the heart of the platform, by becoming the core OS. But just as they faced the prospect of being commoditized by Netscape on the PC, they face a similar challenge from Opera on the mobile.

Probably being a Norway-based company has helped Opera win deals throughout the mobile landscape. They aren’t Microsoft, they aren’t US-based, and they make a very good product. Opera just announced new deals with Toshiba and HTC to make Opera the default browser on the handsets they ship.

Being a default choice is very important. Many people won’t bother to change to something different when it comes to technology, especially if they are of the casual tech user mindset.

For Microsoft, that would represent a utilitarian status for their Windows Mobile OS. If it doesn’t matter what’s underneath the browser, and Opera happens to dominate the mobile field, Microsoft could see manufacturers play serious hardball over licensing Windows Mobile as opposed to Nokia’s Symbian OS.

Isn’t it strange to see Microsoft chasing a smaller upstart again? Almost like déjà vu. Maybe this time, it turns out differently.

Today they are very happy to announce the first public release of their Photosynth Technology Preview. And hey as the Team thought you might have some questions about this release they’ve provided you with some Questions and Answers as provided below. Great Work Team!

Q. What does Photosynth do?

A. Photosynth combines hundreds or thousands of regular digital photos of a scene to present a detailed 3D model, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. The scene can be constructed regardless of whether the photos are from a single or multiple sources. It’s like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience that lets the viewer zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for a more expansive view. By viewing the photos in a 3D context you are able to get a better sense for the place where they were captured.

Q. What exactly is a Technology Preview’?

A. In essence a Technology Preview is a sneak peek at good things to come. Microsoft Live Labs is very much focused on pushing the state of the art of the internet forward and showing what’s possible today. We like to do things quickly and in a very collaborative way. Over time you’ll start to see more and more of our technologies work their way into great products across Microsoft, but in the meantime we want to get your feedback on what we’re doing right, and areas where we can improve. Being on the cutting edge unfortunately comes at a little bit of a cost so if your computer is more than a couple of years old, there’s a chance that your graphics drivers may prevent Photosynth from running properly. If weird stuff happens, please install the latest drivers for your graphics card and try again.

Q.When can I build my own collections?

A. We’re working on it! We want to provide this capability as soon as we can but there are some real technical hurdles to solve before we’re ready for primetime. Today each and every image in a collection needs to be compared against each and every other image in order to see if it’s a match for the scene undergoing reconstruction. Processing to build a collection can take hours or days in some cases. We have lots of ideas on how to improve this processing time but we need some time test some of these ideas and make the tools easy for people to use. In other words, stay tuned and enjoy the collections we’ll be releasing in the months to come until we’re ready for our next big update.

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Darren Straight a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) and Windows Live Butterfly
Expert is a University of Kent Student who is an avid blogger and technology
enthusiast who loves the passion of beta testing new products and services
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Richard Szeliski, the manager of the Interactive Visual Media Group within Microsoft Research, described the prototype, which is called Photosynth. “It’s like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience that lets the viewer zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for a more expansive view,” he said. “This is a revolutionary way for people to interact with photos in a 3-D context that more closely resembles the place where the images were captured.”

The press release reported that a preview of Photosynth can be found here. Photosynth itself “will be available for download later this year,” according to Microsoft, and it may only be a indicator of more interesting products in the works. “Photosynth is the first of many upcoming examples of Live Labs’ ability to take basic research from Microsoft Research and the academic community and rapidly create prototypes of new online services,” according to Dr. Gary William Flake, “noted industry technologist and Microsoft technical fellow.”

Despite the availability of the press release, the “research paper detailing the technology” will not be presented until “Aug. 2 at SIGGRAPH 2006, the 33rd annual international conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques.”

Microsoft also hinted at a possible new Photoshop competitor, as it mentioned “a technology system for drag-and-drop pasting of an object or region from one source image . . . onto another image in such a way that they blend seamlessly.” The company went on to call it a “user-friendly image-composition tool.”

Microsoft seems to be doing some very impressive things with imagery.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.