New Use For Old Pics

Some months ago, I pointed you towards something new that the folks from Microsoft were working on. Someone (Hi, Keith!) pointed out to me that they have now updated that website with a demo you can actually play with. It's a program called Photosynth that lets you insert all of your pictures of a location into a sort of 3D world, then roam around in it, moving from spot to spot and connecting the shots together to form a sometimes cohesive whole. They've got a long way to go with it yet, but it's got some promise. I tried it on two different computers, and I gotta tell you that it's a resource hog. One PC, a brand new one with lots of memory and Vista did real well with it, but my older desktop struggled a bit, I think because it has a smaller video card. So download and play at your own risk. If you get it to work, play with it for a while and you'll start to see the possibilities.