This product creates a panoramic 3D view of an image by synchronizing multiple images. This technology is also known as Photo Tourism. 

it could just be the start of what we call computational photography techniques making its way to the main stream media in a form of a product.

To see the best results of this technology, one should take a lot of pictures of the same or surrounding view from as many angles as possible. Also, Microsoft suggests that this product be used with IE 7 and above or FireFox 3 and above.  Once these pictures are uploaded into Photosynth, it creates a picture which can we viewed at different angles and distance.

This is certainly one of the best products out there on the internet as a result of Microsoft research projects.

Visit Photosynth.net and try the product right away, Click here to see an example of what Photosynth can do.

Watch this mind blowing Photosynth demo video at TED by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth.

So what does it do? Once this plugin is installed you will start seeing a button on the pictures when you mouseover them. It also installs a similar button on your browser, the moment you click on the button it shows all the pictures on the page in form of a 3D Gallery.

It does not only show pictures on your HDD but also searches pictures from online services like Google Images, SmugMug, PhotoBucket, Flickr, Yahoo Images and ofcourse Deviant Art. All you have to do is select one of the services and type in a keyword for search and it will start showing picture results in a 3D Gallery format.

I did not notice any performance issues while using this plugin. I definitely recommend this plugin. Click here to download the plugin
 
Click on the video below to see a demo I have recorded while using the plugin.

Watch the following video to see how it really works.

From what I have seen and known I think Stanford is one of the universities which is majorly researching on imagery and photography. Keith Fife and his team at Stanford have developed a new technology which is called multi-aperture image sensor.

Instead of taking one big picture this technology breaks the entire picture into small 16×16 patches which are overlapping each other, this is called subarrays. The way it works is that the sensor is measures the distance of each patch from lens to object and arrange accordingly.

Attempts have been made in the past to achieve 3D imagery or stereoscopic imaging and the following image shows one of the cameras developed few years ago to take 3D Images. The technology is developed by a company called 3D World and is available in the market now. Click here to visit the product page.

Another attempt was made by Adobe which is working on a similar technology. Click on the following link to view the video. AudioBlog.fr
 
Few months ago I watched a video on Scoble Show based on research of Marc Levoy, a professor at Stanford University.  I was amazed at the things he demonstrated during the interview and it shows the kind of technology and features we can expect to see on our cameras in the future.

Resources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy
• http://home.comcast.net/~jlballou/stereoaerial/sfmcc.html (examples of 3D Images)
  
• http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/elgamal/people/kfife/

Excited about the future of Photography? Me too!