Video: Jaw-dropping Microsoft Photosynth demonstration by Blaise Aguera y Arcas

What is Microsoft Photosynth?

Microsoft Photosynth is one of many project under development by Microsoft Live Labs. The Photosynth Technology is most exciting way to view photos on a computer. Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. You can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

Who is Blaise Aguera y Arcas?

Blaise Aguera y Arcas authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques. He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Microsoft Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space.