Photosynth – Virtual Tour

Have you ever visited Taj Mahal or Pyramids of Egypt or the castles in England? Nope? Haven’t you worried about it? What you gonna do about it?

Don’t worry Microsoft has come up with an idea to solve your problem. You may not be able to afford a trip to Washington DC but you can afford to browse online rite? (Just like me)

So saddle up and visit http://photosynth.net. This site will provide you virtual 3D trip to famous locations in the world. Now I’m browsing through Pyramids , bit excited and wondering how big it is.

To view these virtual locations you need to install a plug-in which enables you to browse them in browsers. You don’t need to install any new standalone applications.

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 the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

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.

Even you can use your images that you took from your digital camera and make such virtual tour. This application will help you to synchronize your images and make a 3D virtual object. Imagine you moved to new home and wanna share it with your friends, isn’t it a wonderful idea????