Have you ever seen a collection of photos of some place or monument and felt the desire of wanting to see it all together in a 180º picture? Since two days ago, you can. Microsoft launched Photosynth, an engine that let's you see your photos of anything pasted together, giving you the experience not of the camera that took the photo, which is limited, but of the photographer thas was behind it and saw it all. The engine tries to catch the intersection areas of each photo and then simulates a 3D environmment that gaves you the whole picture. There's no way you could take this picture from the Beijing's Forbidden City.

I had to try this, so I took the family's Cybershot and start taking shots from my loft's window of my hometown's skyline. This is what I think is the best feature of Photoshynth, the hability to generate 180º pictures. Supposedly, it was a great tool too to generate a 3D view of an object, but I saw it in some of the project's best examples (like the Ferrari) and didn't particularly love the result. You always end up with the feeling you are just seeing inidividual round photos of something, and not some 3D thing. My first experience could end up better, I was just able to achieve 55% of synhty, because suddently the engine was unable to deal with the distance of the objects present in the photos or the lack of intersection areas between those, but I achieved a sequence of twelve photos succesfully conected to each other. So I tried a second time with a bit more patience, and hurray, 100% synthy. It takes you a lot more pictures than you usually would take to achieve a good synthy in Photosynth, so if you're on some synth just seeing two images at a time, of course a normal shot would be able to get the whole area in just a photo, so you achieve litle. But a good synth can show you 7 or more images tied together in a environment you couldn't possibly shoot.

Now, restrictions. Yes, this is a Microsoft product, so don't expect it to be availble on Mac or Linux for now. Also, on Windows, you will need a plugin to experience this all. Anyway, if you meet this conditions try it. Although this has 2 days, I expect it to get even better and surprising. The service is getting so much attention the server is having an hard time dealing with all the demand.

This is the best of Microsoft working so, as a good product it deserves good comments. Hating just for the sake of it, leads to missing the coolest things of today's technology.