Photosynthe Rocks Web 2.0 Summit

The Web 2.0 Summit was awesome – lots of great discussion around business tactics etc, but what blew everyone away was Microsoft LiveLab’s demo of their Photosynthe beta/technology preview.

Imagine being able to virtually fly between a collage of photos, dive into an area for more detail and pan back out…all based on the smart collation of photos of the same place.

Here’s what it does:

…their software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

With Photosynth you can:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
• Send a collection – or a particular view of one – to a friend.

You’ve gotta love the recipe for how they arrived at Photosynthe:

We started with an amazingly fruitful collaboration between the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. We rolled in the luscious visualization technology of the recently acquired Seadragon startup, the speed and compression goodness of the new Windows Media Photo format, the product prowess of the PIX team, and the internet expertise of the Windows Live Local product group. Thrown together in the fertile soup of Live Labs this organic structure is evolving into something quite new – a team with the boldness of a research organization and the shipping discipline of a product group.

It blew the Scobleizer away too.