It’s been just a few short months since we announced Photosynth at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston and boy have we been busy!

Today we’re very happy to announce the first public release of our Photosynth Technology Preview. For those of you who’ve provided encouragement, ideas and spread the word we thank you. We hope that you’ll enjoy our current work and continue to help us shape the technology as we push onwards. For those of you who found yourselves here after your buddy sent you a link to our website saying, ‘You’ve got to check this out!’, read a little about what we’re doing, try it out for yourself, and obviously tell everyone else you know. :)

We thought you might have some questions about this release and we’ll do our best to answer them. If there’s anything we haven’t addressed feel free to post to the comments in the blog and we’ll get to them as quickly as we can.

• 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.

Thanks and enjoy!
The Photosynth Team.