Photosynth

Photosynth is a new way to view photos that is the result of collaboration between Microsoft and researchers at the University of Washington.  The program takes collections of photos of a place or object, looks for similarities, and creates a 3 dimensional version of the place in question. 

Different than static photos and video, Photosynth allows you to explore details of places, objects, and events unlike any other media. You can’t stop video, move around and zoom in to check out the smallest details, but with Photosynth you can. Photosynth can also “… capture the sweeping scale of a mile of the Grand Canal in Venice, and then focus in on the exquisite rot at the waterline of a beautifully decaying palazzo doorway.”

Users can either explore Photosynths made by other people and uploaded to the site, or create their own using desktop or mobile phone applications. You can create two kinds of Photosnyths: simple Panoramas, which paste together images taken from a single perspective, or Synths, which examine an object or a place from different perspectives and allow you to view it from different sides.

Photosynth is useful for creating visualizations of sites to consider development or improvement proposals, document before-and-after pics, or to share results from a photographic engagement exercise. It can be very useful to show details of a site in a meeting setting or online, when people can't physically see the site itself.