Photosynth

If you watched president Obama's inauguration on CNN, you may have seen advertisement about the new technology CNN uses on their web site to bring you the 3D experience of the ceremony. It lets you turn around the scene, navigate into it from different angles, creating the feel like you were there, walking through the crowd, minus the cold and elbow-work. The technology is patented by Microsoft and it's called Photosynth. Here is the video presentation of it.

So, what is Photosynth? It is a new technology (it requires a browser plug-in called Microsoft Silverlight) which looks for similarities in the photographs of the same place/object supplied by many different users who share them over the Internet. The software then reconstructs the object/place in a way to allow the viewer to browse around it in a 3D-like manner, or zoom in it to see the smallest detail.

Photosynth certainly seems like technology which will take the multimedia a step further into the future. It also raises the question of copyrights: who can tell if all the supplied pictures were rightfully released for the photosynth's use? And, does it really matter if the non-copyrighted image consist only a fraction of the total view?
The copyrights question aside, it is an undeniably impressive technology and it will be interesting to follow its advance in the area of multi-media.