Colorado Photography by Chester Bullock

A few weeks ago, Microsoft Photosynth hit the Net. A few of the blogs I follow talked about it, and it looked interesting. I had some time during my conference in Phoenix, so I made a “synth” of my room at the Westin Kierland Resort in Scottsdale, AZ. I downloaded the PDF synth guide with instructions for making a new synth, and set about shooting the room. I wound up with 78 photos.

I shot them in RAW, so I exported them from Lightroom 2 and then started the upload process. This is where my frustration started. It took over 4 hours to upload those pictures. Luckily I had other things to do, like go to the pool and then a dinner engagement, so I left to do that.

When I came back after dinner, the little green box said it was done, and that my photos were “58% synthy”. Whatever that means. I proceeded to load the synth, and was not pleased with the results. For whatever reason, I had expected this to work like other synths I had seen, that acted like a virtual walk-through. I took pictures of the room, the balcony, and the bathroom. I took “approach” photos that I thought my be what synth needed to construct the next scene in the walkthrough. It didn’t do any of this.

You are probably asking why I did all this, and expected a result other than what I achieved. Fair enough. It’s because the PDF instruction set didn’t have specific directions for how to do this. In the absence of those directions, I made an assumption. I wonder how many other people are experiencing this.

Oh well. I don’t really see an application for this anyway. You have to download software to even view these things. When you consider that Flash is on 99% of computers out there, it makes more sense to do virtual tour types of things in Flash than this thing. It’s a solution without a problem.

Apparently, someone I really respect agrees it isn’t ready for widespread usage.