Laura Foy from www.on10.net and crew came to our house a few months ago to tape a Photosynth How-To video. By clicking on our garden gazing ball in the link, about half-way through the video, you get a quick tour of our living room. You can tell it’s our house because of the large life-size Elvis bust on the grand piano, the dead baby heads, the Shriner hats, the bad Louis XIV furniture, the garden gnomes by the fireplace and the Angel of Meat. You can even see a painting of my boys above the fireplace.

Photosynth is part photo gallery, part movie. One photo is shown clearly at a time; adjacent images appear faded, and others less closely related to the photo in focus are look like ghosts. Viewers can zoom in and out, and pan left and right, through the scene created by overlapping many different views of the same place or object.

Galen thinks it will change real estate. It may allow technologically motivated agents to bring better virtual tours to homebuyers. I’m going to try it out with one of my listings soon. The video crew did a great job but they were professionals. It will be interesting to see how it looks when a real schlub takes photos and try to use the software. I’m excited so stay tuned and I’ll post the results.

JoDavid writes about this and Microsoft’s other big news on Unusual Life.

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