History

Photosynth is really two remarkable technical achievements in one product: a viewer for downloading and navigating these complex visual spaces and a "synther" for creating them in the first place.  Together they make something that seems impossible quite possible: reconstructing the 3D world for sets of flat photographs.  This kind of 1+1=5 scenario is what we live for at Live Labs.  But how did they come together in the first place?

You see, it was love at first sight… 

• In 2006 Microsoft acquired small, Seattle-area startup Seadragon, whose technology is capable of delivering a buttery smooth experience browsing massive quantities of visual information over the Internet.  It is all the detail you want, exactly when you want it, with predictable performance regardless of the amount of data—from megapixels to gigapixels. 
• The same year, from the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research), a prototype called ‘photo tourism’ was born.   The idea was simple:  given a few dozen or few hundred photos of a place, is there enough information to reconstruct a 3D model of that place?  The advanced computer vision techniques pioneered in pursuit of this goal form the basis of the synther.

Together these incredible tools are the foundation that makes Photosynth work.  The synther requires large amounts of visual data to generate its 3D environments, and Seadragon technology makes it possible

Seeing the promise in the product, Microsoft Live Labs built a small startup team to incubate the Photosynth project.  Collaborating with teams around Microsoft, including Virtual Earth, Microsoft Research, Windows Live, and others, they have been hard at work making Photosynth more than just a prototype, creating an experience that anyone can enjoy and where anyone can create something amazing...