Photosynth - instant panoramas

Photosynth is a panorama creation app from Microsoft that puts together spectacular images right on your iPhone. The app stitches together as many photos as you take in any direction (including up and down) and gives you an instant, interactive panorama. Taking photos is easy - you take the first then move in any direction and the app automatically takes another photo, lined up with the first. You can spin in a circle and do this to produce a 360 degree shot in less than a minute.

Once you decide to stop taking photos, Photosynth uses on-device processing to stitch the images together and create one photograph. When you view your previously taken shots, you can use your finger to move around in the world like you are standing right where the panorama was taken. The feeling of being able to look left, right, up, and down makes me think of Google Street View, where you can do the exact same thing. Thinking about it, Google Street View must use a very similar technology to create interactive images of all the streets in the country.

It astounds me that the iPhone that fits in my pocket is capable of putting together photographs to create interactive panoramas. In high school we would always have big panoramic pictures taken our of classes, but they had to use special, most likely expensive cameras to do so. Now, I can pull out my phone and do it on the fly. Most point and shoots and DSLRs can't even do this. Mobile photography has its limitations, but there are also many ways in which it exceeds traditional photography. Photosynth shines as a great example of the capabilities of mobile photography.