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Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that will change the way you think about digital photos forever. This software takes large photos of places or objects, analyzes each of them for certain similarities and then displays them on reconstructed three dimensional spaces. With Photosynth, you can walk or fly throughout a scene and see photos in any angle you choose.

You can seamlessly zoom in or out of the photo whether it’s in mega pixels or gig pixels in size. With this software, you can see the place where the pictures were taken and even find similar photos, to the one you’re currently viewing.

In addition, you can also send a collection or just a particular view of one photo to a friend. This Photosynth experience starts with no more than a digital photo. These photos might be taken by one person or they can be a mixture of images from several different shooting conditions, cameras, time of day, dates, and resolutions among others. Each picture is then processed by the computer’s vision algorithms so as to extract several distinctive features such as the corner portion of a window frame, or even a given door handle. Photos can then possess shared features that can be linked together in a web. When the same feature is found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated as well. In fact, it’s similar to depth perception, which means that what your brain perceives of the 3D position of things in your field of view is also primarily based on the images in both of your eyes.

Moreover, a Photosynth 3D model is just a cloud of points that shows where those features are in space. Photosynth doesn’t simply do magic, it has sensors that work even if it doesn’t know where the cameras are or which way they are pointing. If it senses many cameras and many features in common, the algorithms behind the Photosynth has the ability to figure not only the area where the features are, in 3D, but specifically where are all the cameras should have been and which way it was supposedly aimed at, being consistent to the features seen.

Aside from this, Photosynth is capable of showing you the 3D point cloud. Although, more importantly, it can show you the original pictures that are overlaid on the model. You can imagine the slide projector being placed on each unusual camera position along with projecting a picture that the camera took. Hence, the screen is usually placed along the 3D environment and at an appropriate distance from the projector. So, as you move around the Photosynth environment, the projectors will tend to turn on and off, giving you a changing perspective in a world built entirely out of the original photos.

Thus, Photosynth provides an immersive interface, where in, you can walk up to any object in a photograph or even place yourself in the exact area where the photographer was standing when he took the shot. It also provides easy controls for exploring a collection of photos in 3D, with a mere click of a mouse. In the future version of Photosynth, you will be able to see your own photographs displayed in 3D. Sure enough, this will forever change the way you take, view and even perceive your photos.