Microsoft Photosynth wins praise

Walter Mossberg, the WSJ's tech guru, writes this week about Photosynth, a new free web-based service from Microsoft. Photosynth turns multiple photos of a scene or site into a 3-D scene you can “walk” through on the Web. A Photosynth creation, called a “synth,” is a virtual 3-D environment that gives you the feeling you are in the middle of a room looking around, or circumnavigating a building or object. You can travel through a scene both laterally and vertically, and zoom in to see detailed, higher-resolution views of objects inside the synth, such as paintings on a wall. Photosynth will be launched at midnight tonight at photosynth.net.