Photosynth Comes to the iPhone

One of the best products so far to emerge from Microsoft’s Live Labs has got to be Photosynth, an amazing tool that lets you transform your photos into three-dimensional worlds you can then virtually explore. In the past, we’ve seen Photosynths integrated with Live Maps, turned into slideshows, geotagged, changed into Point Clouds, and even used to document historical events like President Obama’s inauguration. Now you can add one more to that list: Photosynth has come to the iPhone.

With the new iPhone application iSnyth (iTunes URL: http://www.itunes.com/app/isynth) just released today in the iTunes App Store, you can view photosynths with your iPhone or iPod Touch. Within the application, there are buttons for the most recent and most viewed synths as well as a funny category called “nice and synthy,” which apparently means they have tons of photos per synth. In the ones I saw, for example, most were “100% synthy.” There’s also a search option that lets you search for synths using keywords.

Clicking on a synth first gives you a brief description of the image including number of views, number of photos used, date, percentage “synthy,” and a thumbnail from the image. You can then press the “View Synth!” button to delve into the synth on your phone. As with the viewer application on your computer, you can explore the synth using the directional arrow keys, tap to zoom in and out, and even hit a button to see the point clouds.

Unfortunately, you can’t turn your iPhone images into snyths using the new viewer app – you still need to use your Mac or PC to do that. But you can show them off to others here when you’re finished.

iSynth was developed by Greg Pascale with permission from Microsoft. Greg was an intern on the Photosynth team during the summer of 2008. He’s currently a student at Brown University, class of 2009. However, iSynth isn’t a Microsoft product nor is it officially supported by Microsoft. Instead, Greg will provide his own support via GetSatisfaction.