If you’ve ever taken several photos of a scene and ’stitched’ them together into a panorama, then you have an idea of a new world to come with ‘Synthing’ photos. Although that comparison is rather like comparing a bicycle to the space shuttle as similar modes of transportation.

Photosynth is a new service from Microsoft. It allows you, for free, to upload hundreds of photos of any particular location. It will then stitch them all together and give you a virtual world where you can ‘dive in’ to any part of the location and zoom in, zoom out and look around.

The service just went live today (August 21, 2008), so, if you go there and try to play with it, don’t be surprised if it’s “busy.” It might be best to wait a day or even a week. Meanwile, you could be taking some pictures that would be good for a ’synth.’ That is, take a lot of pictures of one subject. Take the photos from every angle. Take closeups and distance shots. When they get synthed together, you will have a 3 dimensional experience.

Although the possibilities for sharing your travel photos is exciting … the long range possibilities are even more so. Here is a video of a presentation by a co-creator of Photosynth. The presentation is from TED – Technology, Education and Design. I love TED! Whenever I want some inspiration, I go to TED.com and watch a video. I dream of attending one of their conferences someday. Take a look by clicking the play button below. If that doesn’t work for you, you can use this link to TED.com instead.

Here’s the Youtube version:

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