I originally wondered about what was happening to Photosynth back in May and now it looks as if Microsoft has officially launched it and is having some success too. I am very excited about this and it’s possible impacts on virtual reality. What a cool way to go see things that were formerly too difficult or expensive to get to! Kudos to Microsoft on their success. Unfortunately it’s still just Windows, and I’m unable to access it via Parallels on the Mac. According to the satisfaction.com support forums, VMWare’s current beta works.

I was very impressed with the Photosynth technology when I first saw the TED video online late last year and recently was discussing this with some folks who hadn’t seen it. I wanted to capture this and to see where the technology has progressed to now that it’s owned by Microsoft.

One thing I noticed was the similarity of the image effects engine in Silverlight and Photosynth. The Hard Rock Cafe demoed their implementation of a massive graphic presentation during Mixx (I think) and launched their own 257 image memorabilia exploration tool tool which looks VERY MUCH like the Photosynth tool demoed at TED. I’ve found the performance of the application to be sluggish even over broadband, but it is a nice way to explore such a large dataset.

Microsoft’s Labs site has the Photosynth demo online for XP/Vista users only. I am really more interested in seeing the impact of the 3D modeling software that was demoed in the second half of the video. Unfortunately my 1st generation MacBook Pro and Vista install wouldn’t cooperate and run the demo.

Silverlight is fully supported on the Mac (even using Safari). For now I’ll have to be patient and hopeful. The visual effects engine and massive image set pieces have been integrated with Silverlight. Perhaps Silverlight 3 or some other future version will bring in the 3D visualization components.