Microsoft Photosynth Tech Preview - Photo Sharing 3.0?

Back in the day rich people used to get pictures painted of themselves and their family. Then came photography and that put a lot of painters out of business. Until relatively recently the photo album didn't change much. When people wanted to show off their vacation photos, friends were invited to endure endless hours of slide shows and sticky vinyl pages of photo albums. From now on I will refer to this pre-digital period as Photo Sharing 1.0.

Next came the digital age with cracked LCDs, increasingly awesome picture quality and photosharing (including the most unknown site atpic.com). This is the age we live in currently and it's pretty good. I can upload great photos of my adventures to show my friends and family and they don't have to get off their a$$e$. Or I can send terrible photos from my cellphone for instant gratification at a drunken moments notice. This I will refer to as Photo Sharing 2.0.

Now comes Photosynth Preview from Microsoft. To get it working, you'll need IE and it'll take a couple minutes to load the plug in. Once loaded, the navigation is very fluid. Zoom with the mouse wheel, and click to fly around from photo to photo. Photosynth currently only has sample photos loaded but it greatly differs from all photo sites because the metadata of these photos includes location/position information. What this means to you is that the photos create a 3D world.

Current digital cameras can create panoramic pictures by weaving together multiple shots. This takes it to the next level by recreating the whole location. Today's digital cameras don't include GPS hardware to note the specific location of a photograph, this technology is coming to mobile phones in the US and it is only a matter of time before it is tied into the camera on the phone (which will be pretty decent in the next couple years).

This is a preview, so you can't do anything except play around right now with the preloaded photos. However if this is what photo sharing is going to be in the future then it is going to be the shiznit!