Microsoft Photosynth creates 3D panoramas from 2D photos

Kudos to Microsoft for rolling out a tool that's likely to amuse you for hours on end: It's called Photosynth, and it's free for everyone with a Windows Live or MS Passport account.

The concept is simple: Upload a series of still photos capturing a single area, subject, landscape, or anything else, then Photosynth stitches them all together to create a three-dimensional panorama out of the collection. When the stitching is done, you can rotate, pan, and zoom in and out. The more photos you have, the more complete and complex the panorama becomes. (Note that a small software download is required, but it works with both Firefox 3 and IE7.)

The easiest way to see what I mean is to simply check out a few examples. Photosynth has hundreds of them (submissions just became open to the public last night, which immediately crashed the service completely; it's back up now), ranging from the dull to the dazzling. It took me three tries to upload my own without crashing, but you can see my own example on the site, a small test of just seven images stitched together. (That's my bar, "the best home bar in San Francisco," which is far too monumental to be captured in just one photo.) Detail is impressive, as Photosynth keeps all the data in the original images: Try zooming in using the "+" button and you can even read the labels on the bottles and the titles of the books.

Photosynth isn't just a cool toy (though it certainly is that), it's also got immense commercial potential too. Imagine walkthroughs of restaurants or real estate, just for starters. Museums could put this to amazing use. No longer will those boring static pictures have to tell the story. Now you'll be able to stitch together a few hundred images and wander through an environment almost as if you're there.

The service is brand new, of course, so expect some hiccups if you try it out yourself. When it works, it's surprisingly fast: It takes longer to upload all the images to the site than it does to crunch them into a panorama.

Congrats, Microsoft. This is very cool stuff!

LINK: Photosynth