I found out about a great technology coming out of Microsoft Live Labs at the moment.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Microsoft has setup some labs not dissimilar (surprisingly) to Google’s own labs, where they have brought -

‘scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and the online community together to think about and build a better online world.’

Now Microsoft to its credit does come up with some good stuff. Unfortunately it also has a habit of not taking full advantage of it and the technology or product getting sidelined and never really getting anywhere.

Photosynth is one of those technologies I really hope doesn’t. Its has been about since about the middle of 2006 in one form or another. So what does it do?

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

Several people are doing similar technologies and not so long ago I blogged about Polar Rose, who are using photo recognition technology to allow people to tag objects or people in photos. Then, the software would use some recognition technology to find similar objects or people to allow you to search for them easily online. You can find out more about it at www.polarrose.com.

But Photosynth is something very special- it takes photo recognition and manipulation to a new level. It analyzes a load of photos looking for similarities and then arranges them, allowing you to get a 3D view of whatever it is being photographed. The photos can come from a range of cameras at different resolutions and angles and the technology will arrange them accordingly. It isn’t an easy thing to describe and so I suggest everyone heads over to http://labs.live.com/photosynth/.