Title: MS Photosynth, very cool indeed ! Date: 21 August 2008 URL: https://ralovely.com/blog/2008/08/21/ms-photosynth-very-cool-indeed/ Author: Raphael Campardou Archived: yes --- This is an old post, kept here for posterity. Some links may be broken, opinions may have changed, and technology has certainly moved on. --- Most of my 2 readers know that: I'm a Mac Fan Boy... We could put it another way: I'm usually not impressed with what comes out of Microsoft. But once in a while, let's face it, they have some pretty cool stuff. [Surface](http://www.microsoft.com/surface/) is cool, for instance. But this time it's more than cool. This time, it's mega-cool. This time it's [Photosynth](http://photosynth.net/). I discovered it like 2 years ago, via their [Live Lab](http://livelabs.com/ "MS Live Labs") website. Photosynth takes a collection of photos of the same place, and merges them in a huge 3D/360° panoramic. It's completely amazing. At first, it was a University of Washington project called [Photo Tourism](http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/), and they didn't screw it when they brought it back in Redmond. The videos of the prototype are down, now that the product is live. One is available on [Youtube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p16frKJLVi0 "Photosynth Proto on Youtube") though (even if it's less appealing in low res...). They also presented a demo at [TED](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html "Photosynth @ TED") last year. You can't access Photosynth from a Mac. I especially like the phrasing of the error page:
Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet.
BootCamped Mac will do; parallel or VMware won't. Try it, it's really amazing. --- For the humans reading the machine-readable version: hello. You're thorough. I appreciate that.