A friend and neighbor has been entertaining us with his 3D photos. They’re terrific but they require a special lens and special viewer. It’s almost like the old stereopticon - you slide the two-part photo into the viewer, and voilà, you’re right there in the picture. The downside? I couldn’t make my eyes work properly and all I ever saw were two pictures sort of superimposed on one another…

Microsoft has come up with a photo manipulation tool that makes it possible to create a - more or less - three-dimensional image on your personal computer. Here’s how the folks at Microsoft Labs describe Photosynth:

Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.

Check out the following video and description of how this all works. Absolutely amazing! And what’s more, all that happens behind the scenes to create a three-dimensional image from multiple images taken by an ordinary person.

I was all ready to try it out, but got this message from the nice folks in Redmond:

Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.

Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.

That said, I’ll be waiting impatiently for a version for my MacBookPro!