Slashgeo

Very Spatial links to Microsoft Live Labs' Photosynth, which "takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space ." There's a must watch video and must read "smart photos" page. From Very Spatial: "The word is that Photosynth will be available for free, at least at first, but no word yet on an exact release date." This tool will directly compete with Stitcher, and to some extent, Google SketchUp. The user-friendly virtual world reconstruction tools is getting crowded (see previous stories below). Microsoft doesn't yet have software to tie a photo library with Windows Live Local (Google does), but don't be surprised if it comes to life. Update: 08/01 15:51 GMT by S : Got the story Slashdotted, with a link to Very Spatial :-)

The VE4Gov blog provide some information on the Microsoft Army Symposium and Virtual Earth / Photosynth involvement. From the blog: "All appeared to quickly recognize the potential of Virtual Earth for situational awareness and the value of the 3D city models and terrain for urban warfare tactics and mission training. While some were intrigued by the possibilities of Virtual Earth 3D for combat readiness, others envisioned its use to safely get medical aide and supplies to soldiers in theater, and still others talked of Virtual Earth as a tool for supporting national emergencies such as hurricanes. [...] How will we integrate Photosynth and Virtual Earth? It's not yet clear. There is a natural synergy between the products and something Microsoft is exploring but it remains to be seen what integration will look like."

CNET News reports "NASA and Microsoft have teamed up to give people a 3D photographic look at the space shuttle Endeavour before its launch this week, in a public-private partnership that could lead to more use of digital imagery in future space-agency missions.

Microsoft on Monday will release a downloadable viewer that includes hundreds of photos of the space shuttle, NASA's vehicle assembly building and the shuttle's launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Endeavour is scheduled for flight Wednesday.)"

Correction : The Google Earth Blog actually reported this story yesterday. My apologies to the blog's author.

Ogle Earth reports first about this major VE update. Head on over there for more details, but the new features are :

• Importing of GeoRSS and GPX and.... KML!
• Bird's eye view in 3D
• 3D modelling
• Better search

A longer more detailed list can be found here in the Virtual Earth Developer Forum. Be sure to check out the Sketchup Killer app they bundled with the update. Right click on the 3D globe, and select "Add 3D model". It will install the modelling app at this point. Update: 10/17 13:39 GMT by S : I added a few related stories below. This is really a major improvement of Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Here's another GEB entry on the new KML support in VE. SharpGIS offers a few interesting screenshots. And be sure to read the official Virtual Earth blog entry. Oh, and Microsoft have rejoined the Open Geospatial Consortium, this is great news!

SlashDot is currently running a discussion on another technology along the likes of Photosynth by Microsoft. To help you differentiate between the two, a co-author of the new tech wrote in one of his comments on SlashDot : "I also worked on the Photo Tourism project (which is related to Photosynth). There's a big difference between Photosynth and this new 3D reconstruction work, in that Photosynth takes a photo collection and reconstructs camera positions and a sparse point cloud (a set of disconnected 3D points floating in space), while in this new work we build *dense* 3D models of scenes (in the form of polygon meshes). Dense models are usually much better for use in applications like computer graphics, since they can be used to render scenes with much more photo-realism."

Here is SlashDot's summary : "The billion of images available from a site like Flickr has stimulated the imagination of many researchers. After designing tools using Flickr to edit your photos, another team at the University of Washington (UW) is using our vacation photos to create 3D models of world landmarks. But recreating original scenes is challenging because all the photos we put on Flickr and similar sites don't exhibit the same quality. With such a large number of pictures available, the researchers have been able to reconstruct with great accuracy virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York City."

The Virtual Earth blog has an article and video excerpt showing the use of PhotoSynth in an episode of CSI. From their summary: "This weeks episode of CSI featured Photosynth being used to recreate a high school gym in 3d from a set of photos taken by dozens of phone cameras. It was cool that they used Photosynth 'as is' with very little post production lipstick; its high-techy enough on its own without the need for the usual ridiculous embellishments TV and movies usually rely on to portray cutting edge tech."

Go check out the video on the site above, as it's pretty good.