What is Photosynth?

Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience.

Whether it’s a quiet creek in the woods of Pennsylvania, or the grandeur of the interior of St Paul’s cathedral, Photosynth puts you there like nothing else can.

It can capture the sweeping scale of a mile of the Grand Canal in Venice, and focus in on the exquisite rot at the waterline of a beautifully decaying palazzo doorway.

Want to share your amazing new room with your friends—after all what justice do a bunch of thumbnails do for a room that took you a month to decorate? Only a synth can capture every detail.

And it’s not just for spaces and places. Photosynth is an amazing way to share the full juicy details of the stuff in your life.

Go on, get synthing.

How does it work?

Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos. Photosynth was inspired by the breakthrough research on Photo Tourism from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. This work pioneered the use of photogrammetry to power a cinematic and immersive experience

Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.

More information on the history of Photosynth is available here.

About this Release

Photosynth comes from a passionate little startup of two dozen people in Microsoft Live Labs. We are scientists, engineers, and designers working like crazy to deliver on Photosynth’s promise.

What you see on this site is the first of many versions of Photosynth. Call it beta, call it 1.0, call it whatever you want… just know we are hard at work adding support for more browsers, more platforms, and more hardware, and just making the experience that much more amazing.

Where it will go from here will be shaped by your feedback. We can’t wait to hear from you.

Want to know even more?

We’ve got a boatload of information about what our community is up to on our blog.. You can get advice on making that one synth turn out perfectly on our community site.