Microsoft’s Photosynth Technology Preview now available

I have been waiting for Photosynth to come out ever since I blogged it back in the summer. On Thursday, the Photosynth Technology Preview was finally made available for download. It is not a beta, since you can’t yet work with your own collections, but you can play with the functionality of the viewing environment using some collections. And, I have to say, I am totally impressed. The Photosynth demos show you the point cloud that was generated for each photo collection, and then you can navigate around and see each photo in its referenced location and look at the 3D rendering of the photos. Even though it’s not even a beta yet, I just think it’s cool. Many, many possibilities come to mind again, of course, by linking Photosynth to a virtual globe, such as, let’s say, Virtual Earth 3D…..

Some things to keep in mind, if you download it: Read the technical specs on download page. It only runs in IE 6 or 7, and there are some components that will need to be installed, but I had it up and running in about 2 minutes.