Agent Will

How much do you want to bet that Microsoft’s Photosynth takes a big chunk of the virtual tour market?

For those of you who don’t know what PhotoSynth is, in a nutshell it encourages you take lots and lots of photos and then the software looks for similarities to stitch them all together and create an environment where the viewer can look at a whole object from all sides and in a non-linear fashion.  Got that?

Watch the demo below.  Someone has done a simple house exterior.  You may have to download a viewer plugin but you might as well do it because this is the first of many, many photosynths you’ll be looking at in the future.  Oh yeah, they’re merging it into Microsoft Virtual Earth (which may already be the Google Earth slayer).

You can zoom in and out, drag and scroll, basically manipulate it in any way… experiment with the controls and have fun. It may seem a bit odd at first but with some practice it becomes a very, very, very cool and natural way to really look at an object (in this case a house).

Now I just have to think about whether I give it a shot on my next listing (you know, test people’s reaction).

What do you think of it?

You can see a whole lot more synths at photosynth.net.