http://labs.live.com/photosynth/videodemo.htmlThis looks impressive. I have never seen anything like it yet. Could it be. Have microsoft designed something cool that wasn't copied / stolen from elsewhere ?
Looks like "iPhoto meets Core Animation meets QuickTime VR and automagically renders a 3D environment for you". Could be a really cool thing - if they manage to actually ship this as a real product.
WinFS also looked like a really cool thing. Unfortunately, they never managed to get it out of the door. The list of announced-but-never-shipped-COOL-MS-products is long...
This is a lot like the idea of turning videos / many still images into 3D environments by scary processing stuff and piles of vertices, but this one here actually has some possibility to work, and a much greater usefulness.
Really cool stuff. It would be interesting, if they got this into a full product, to see how high the success rate is. What are the chances that when you zoom in on something you will end up with the right image? It would need a pretty smart indexer, but it would be incredible to see it work. This could change everything and make that graphics hardware useful for something productive!
*Gasp* They seem to have a running preview. (And what's more? It works in Firefox!).
It is a known fact that MS's labs projects are cooler than their big / popular things. The same happens with Google, too.