On the Zoom.it homepage, there are a handful of examples, including a gorgeous high-res image of a galaxy snapped by Hubble, a panoramic view of an old map of Milwaukee, from the Library of Congress, an expansive panorama of Yosemite (via the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project) and more.

The Zoom.it service runs on Windows Azure and uses Microsoft Silverlight. End users can try it now from http://zoom.it. Developers can access the API from here.

(via Steve Clayton)

Engadget (via MIT’s Technology Review) uncovered a cool Microsoft Research project called “Street Slide” view. The project attempts to create a new interface for viewing the street-level photos used in online applications like Bing Maps Streetside View.

As explained on the project’s homepage, today’s mapping applications enable users to virtually visit cities by way of “immersive 360 degree panoramas, or bubbles.” Users move from bubble to bubble, but this doesn’t necessarily provide the best visual sense of a city street.

With Street Slide, the researchers took the best aspects of the “immersive bubbles” and transformed them into multi-perspective strip panoramas. You can actually slide out of a bubble to see the street from a different perspective – a strip that’s viewed from a greater difference. When viewed in this mode, the empty space above and below the strip could be used for business logos and building numbers (addresses), or even ads.

According to the MIT article, the researchers have already made a version of this technology for mobile devices, including the iPhone. “It broadens out your visual sense to cover a two-block radius,” says Michael Cohen, a senior scientist at Microsoft Research.

Who’s hoping for a WP7 phone implementation of this tech? I know I am. In case I didn’t explain this too well, you can see Street Slide in action in the video here.

The blog itself features thought-provoking, interesting, beautiful or otherwise eye-catching photos from around the world. Each photo is accompanied by a short description and a link to a related news story elsewhere on MSNBC or a photo slideshow.

Posts are also tagged so you can browse more of that same genre. Registered users can leave comments. And at the bottom of the page, a social networking bar lets you share the blog via Facebook, Twitter and email.

More design tweaks and features are coming “in the near future” promises a quick post about the new site.

In the meantime, you can follow the site via RSS or email or simply go here: photoblog.msnbc.msn.com

You can also export your ICE images to Deep Zoom and HD View and there’s an ICE add-in for use in Photo Gallery.

Now, with the new update to ICE, it supports a “Publish to Photosynth” option. This lets you send your full-resolution panoramas to the Microsoft Photosynth website, which has also been updated to accommodate the new, wider imagery. Look for the new “Expand/Contract Viewer” button to the right of the plus sign in the Photosynth controls.

Rick, beatnavy, fjcwhistler, siblog, cgsguy2, Mooseboys, MidnightFrog, rieskame, erickoo, BDsynth,Onyxmoon63, singalittlesong, kriskrug, GaryGlanz, brad_dennis, bal, jessica.glago, neilbl, msnbc.com,jimcseke, Lit, aeolien

(Click through on any of their names to see their Photosynth submissions.)

The top synths – aka the “most viewed” – included those featuring the sports themselves like luge, skating, curling, and skiing in addition to synths from Vancouver and those from other major events like the torch lighting, for example.

You can see some of these favorite synths in the image below:

For more Olympic action, head to the Photosynth site and search for Olympics.

However, Microsoft Research is working on a process that sounds like it would be the best yet – if it works. The researchers are developing technology that reads your mind in order to tag the photos for you. According to an article on singularityhub.com, this mind-reading machine uses an EEG to measure the brain activity created by looking at an image.  Although EEGs only provide general guidelines (as opposed to exact object names), says the article, the researchers were able to tell whether a person was looking at a picture of a face, an inanimate object, or an animal. Amazing!

You can read more about this project headed by researcher Desney Tan here (PDF).

The end result is a virtual manifestation of the wall’s fall created with the thousands of pictures added by the community. Since the site uses Silverlight, you can zoom in and out and move all around the wall using the built-in controls.

You can check out the Berlin Wall mosaic on either of the two sites hosting it - here or here.

(via UX Connection)

The application uses the Flickr API over the internet, so the speed with which you can browse through the files will be heavily dependent on your own internet connection speeds. Since I’m on FiOS, I didn’t see much of a delay, but your experience may differ.

Both a downloadable executable and source code are provided for the Flickr Drive program from the project’s homepage here.

Unfortunately, the actual PhotoSketch site appears to be down at the moment, most likely thanks to the large amounts of traffic they’ve received over the past few days due to media coverage. When it comes back online, though, it’s definitely something worth checking out. Just bookmark this URL for future reference: http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn:8080/cmm/?page_id=155

With the move to Silverlight, there’s a lower frame rate, the Photosynth team acknowledged in a blog post, but they’re working to improve the performance so the Silverlight viewer can be more feature rich and match or even outperform the old one. They say that the move was “one step back” but really was “two steps forward” since it allows Mac users to fully participate on the website and the editing and highlighting features can be built right into the viewer code.

Another new feature is called “Synth Highlights.” This feature lets you pinpoint the best spots within a synth which are shown in a small sidebar to the right of the 3D image. You can simply click through the highlights to travel through the synth without missing any of the good stuff. Here are a couple of examples:  Nellie Inglerock - Masonic Cemetery and Art Gallery of New South Wales.

To add highlights to your synth, look for the “Edit Synth and Highlights” link in the right area of your synth (you have to be logged in first). Then find a great photo, optionally title and/or caption it, and click “Add Highlight.” Click “Save,” and you’re done.

But unlike the panoramic technology that runs in WLPG, the ICE software provides a few extra features, too. The most important one is the orientation tool. With this, you can change the orientation of a photo to give the impression that a tilt/shift lens was used. For example:

You could also use a perspective projection instead of a cylindrical one with the tool. Example:

Or you could set the mid-point of a 360-degree panorama:

ICE also adds a variety of export options including Deep Zoom and HD View. Use ICE to export to either of these two options and it will generate a web page that handles viewing these images in a much more efficient manner (they tend to be very large images by default).  For Deep Zoom photos, the web page will use Silverlight to allow for interactivity with the image. HD View is like Deep Zoom but also adds some extra affects – it can rewarp the panorama on the fly using a fish-eye lens, auto-exposure adjust for looking into those deep shadows of the panorama, and it will support wide-color-gamut monitors. HD View is still more experimental technology and will require a special plugin. You can get it here.

Add to Photo Gallery!

Now you can take this advanced ICE photo manipulation technology and integrate it into Windows Live Photo Gallery. Just download it and install it. You’ll then see a new menu item in the WLPG “Extras” menu:

To use ICE, simply select a group of images and then launch it using the new menu item.

(via Windows Live Photo & Video Blog)

When you’re viewing a photo album in Windows Live, there’s an option at the top to “Send a Link.” You may think that this will open up whatever email program you use or move you into your Windows Live Mail/Hotmail, but actually, it’s just a feature of the service.

When you click the link, you’ll be taken to a page where you can enter in the email addresses of those you want to share the pictures with. The form has a nice auto-complete feature which will automatically fill in their information if you have those folks saved in your contacts (at people.live.com or within your Windows Live Mail/Hotmail).

However, if you’re always sending photos to the same group of people – like those in your family for example, you should go ahead and create a list. Go to people.live.com and click on the “Category” drop-down. From there, create a new category and add people from your contacts to that list.

Now whenever you’re on the “Send a Link” page, you can just click the checkmark next to that list. Click “Send” when you’re finished and your family, friends, co-workers, or whoever it was you shared with will receive an email from Windows Live alerting them to your new photos. And, assuming you leave the bottom box checked, they won’t have to sign in with a Windows Live ID in order to view them – they can just click the link in their email.

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. 

Before, the point cloud viewing mode was only available in the Windows client. But with a recent update, the Photosynth point clouds are now available from within Silverlight, too. This is great news for Linux and Mac users as they both use the Silverlight Viewer.

The update also included a lot of improvements like better object rotation and several minor bug fixes. 

Now go try it.

Take, for example, Jason of Odyssey Expeditions, who created this Seadragon Ajax viewer for GigaPan images. It’s still being worked on, but it’s pretty cool. There’s also Daniel Gasienica’s pipeline for loading up GigaPan images into the new Seadragon Mobile iPhone app. Just enter http://gigapan-mobile.appspot.com/feed/ as an RSS feed in the Seadragon Mobile app to see his GigaPan images – one being David Bergman’s Obama inauguration photo, of course.

(via dragonosticism)

After installing Windows Live Photo Gallery (a part of the new Windows Live Essentials suite) on two computers, you can then set them up to sync with each other. To do so, click Setup gallery sync…from the File Menu in Photo Gallery and follow the instructions provided. (You’ll need to be signed in with your Windows Live ID first).

In addition to syncing the photos themselves, the software also syncs your history of edits.

Sync currently will work with up to 20 synchronized folders containing up to 20,000 files each.

Using the PhotoJoy application, you can import photos from your computer, your Flickr account, or from PhotoJoy’s own online gallery of professional images. You can then transform them into screensavers, collages, or widgets. These widgets, or PhotoToys, can display your photos as cubes, magazines, mobiles, shuffles, and more.

If you choose the option to import your photos from Flickr, you’ll also want to enable the web streaming feature, too, as this will automatically update your PhotoJoy creations with new images as they become available online.

The PhotoJoy application is available as a free download and is spyware and adware free.

By visiting “The Moment” web site at CNN, you can see the end results of these efforts. Here, one giant Photosynth’ed image is displayed on the screen. You can pan and zoom and rotate the images as you wish…or, if you do nothing, the CNN page refreshes the photos for you. Given the amount of people in the photos, you can zoom in and out forever, focusing on different sections of the image. (For example, check out the men in black on the roof of the capital!)

But while “The Moment” received special attention thanks to CNN, there are tons of other inauguration-related synths to explore. Just go to http://photosynth.net/inauguration.aspx and click on any of the red pushpins to see the photos taken in various areas of Washington D.C., including images from the parade, at area monuments, or elsewhere in the crowd.

PhotoSuru lets you display your photo albums as a filmstrip at the top of the screen with the larger photos displayed underneath. There are different views available – you can overlay descriptions or click more to see the photo and a longer rich text description beside the photo. You can also import subscriptions from a folder on your hard drive. You can even “drive” the app with a remote control!

For a video demonstration, check out this post on Channel 9. Or to visit the app itself, visit the PhotoSuru homepage. 

To use Mooncake, you must first sign up for the service at http://beta.redmooncake.net.

To create an album, you begin by clicking on create new collection:

Next you choose “add photos.” Here you can select from either Flickr or SmugMug – and uploading from your PC is a feature listed as coming soon:

Once you enter in your username for your preferred photo-sharing service, you can then choose the album drop-down box to show just the photos from a particular online album:

You can select individual photos or click a link to easily select them all. Once you have all the photos selected, click the “add photos” button at the bottom.  The service will build a deep-zoomable album for you which you can then preview and share.

The album is embeddable as either a standard viewer (400x400) or mini-viewer (200x200) or you can customize the code to your liking using the viewer size options box at the bottom of the page.

You can then copy and paste the code and add the viewer to any web site on the net as either an object, iframe, or javascript embed.

The new Live Photo Gallery actually has a built-in “Straighten Photo” feature. To use this feature, select your photo and click on the “Fix” button in the top toolbar. Then, just click the “Straighten Photo” option. Your picture will automatically straighten itself out! And if you need to fine-tune the adjustment, you can optionally use the slider to adjust the angle. Just move the slider to the right to rotate the picture clockwise and move it to the left for counter-clockwise. The grid that appears can help you align your photo perfectly.

Here’s an example of both the before and after (see below).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

(Thanks to Arwa Tyebkhan for this tip…and example photos!)

Although the software is doing pretty complex stuff on the back end, the front end is surprisingly easy to use. You just point it to a folder containing your photos and click a button - that's it! AutoCollage will then goes to work. When the collage is complete - a process that only takes a few seconds - your resulting image can be printed, emailed, or set as your desktop wallpaper. 

For great results, it's suggested that you use 7-30 photos for the best performance, but the software defaults to 12. AutoCollage works on both Vista and XP SP2+ and is available as a free download from here.