The combination of digital photos and 3d virtual world mapping is just one of the goals of Photosynth, a new project by Microsoft to be demonstrated August 2nd.

Here’s Microsoft’s explanation:

"Ever wondered what it would be like to walk through your digital photos in 3D or see what hundreds of other people shot at the same location? See Photosynth in action and hear how Live Labs is exploring new ways to change the way you think about the web.”

But it’s much cooler than that.  Photosynth allows you to define spatial relationships between your individual images, and then to use the composite effect of those relationships to navigate around the 3Dspace you have created. 

On the site they use the example of a series of standards photos of St. Mark’s Square in Venice.  Photosynth stiches those photos together into a virtual space, which you can then zoom around as if you had painstakingly rendered your own 3D model.

But wait, there’s more.  There’s a colloborative aspect to the program as well.  Image a model of St. Mark’s made of up of your’s and thousands and other people’ s holiday snaps.  It would make for a very accurate model indeed.

It’s unclear what kind of application this will be (web-based?  free?), but it’s a very interesting strategic broadside against both Yahoo/Flickr on the photo colloboration side, and at Google on the mapping satellite mapping side. 

Read more and see a demonstration from Live Labs here. (thanks Jason and Virginia).

Misha Cornes