MICROSOFT has introduced an online program that lets users combine collections of photos into movie-like three dimensional images of places or objects.
The product, called Photosynth, scans pictures and determines how they relate to one another, says Alex Daley, senior product manager for Microsoft's Live Labs.
For example, a user's photos of the Piazza San Marco in Venice can be stitched together, allowing the viewer to wander through, take a 360-degree look at objects and zoom in to see architectural details.
Microsoft is trying to grab consumers' attention with its internet services as competition mounts from Google, which runs the top search engine and video site.
Microsoft's internet unit, which lost $US1.23 billion ($1.42 billion) last year, has mostly created me-too products, rather than real innovations, according to investor Tony Ursillo at Loomis Sayles in Boston.
There was "overwhelming demand" for the service when it debuted online, preventing users from being able to upload their photos, Microsoft says on a blog devoted to the product.
The site was working again that evening, the company says.
A preview version of the new software, released last year, required a supercomputer to organise the photos. Now the images can be created in a few minutes on a standard computer.
The software has been used by NASA to show the space shuttle preparing for launch and by the BBC for its How we built Britain series.
Ordinary users can now create synths of their own photos, Daley says. The free service includes 20GB of storage.
Users also can view synths with images from NASA, the BBC, the National Geographic Society and sculptor Dale Chihuly.
Microsoft will probably develop a corporate version of the software, Daley says. For now, all the collections posted on the site are public, so companies cannot use it for confidential designs.
Even so, Boeing wants to use the software to document repair procedures for its planes, says David Gedye, group manager for the Live Labs unit, which created the product. Luxury real estate company Brown Harris Stevens is testing the program as a way to give clients virtual tours of its properties.
In the future, Microsoft may be able to use the technology behind Photosynth to enhance mobile phone searches, Daley says.
Over the past three years, Microsoft and Google have tried to one-up each other in areas such as satellite mapping, mobile phone searches and image searches. This product, based on a 2006 acquisition and years of work by researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington, will be hard for Google and other competitors to match, Gedye says.
Bloomberg
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