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. I first heard of Photosynth late last year and was re-introduced to it after reading a post by Marina over at SearchTank. Marina provided a great analogy of Photosynth comparing it to when Microfiche first came out:

“The scalable pictures remind me of how revolutionary microfiche was when it first came out, enabling tons of information to be stored in such a small format. This would be a fantastic application for a digital archive. As well as the more obvious map applications, I think this technology could be applied to information discovery such as an interactive encyclopedia as people tag their images with information about what is contained in them. Viewers would be able to browse the images, jumping in and out of images as things caught their attention.” – SearchTank

Here’s a video of its architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas, demoing the product:

Want more insight on Photosynth? Check these sites out:

• Microsoft Labs: Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth
• Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth at Wikipedia
• MSDN: PhotoSynth: What. How. Why.
• Scoble: The best demo at Web 2.0 Summit: Microsoft’s Photosynth …
• GalaxyGoo Blogs: PhotoSynth
• Ming the Mechanic: Photosynth
• Seadragon and Photosynth demo at TED2007
• Metaverse Friday – Photosynth
• Everyscape: Google StreetView Meets Micosoft Photosynth Meets Yahoo’s Flickr – SearchEngineLand
• Photosynth. Wow. – Digital Blue Global