I had the opportunity to see this technology demo’d about a year ago and it appears that it has come a long way. From Microsoft’s Live Labs, Photosynth is a technology that papers together pictures to create a 3D view.

From their site:

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest – and, we hope, most exciting – way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

You can now download the technical preview and play with it here.

For the photographer this creates a whole new world. Imagine going to a place and taking photos with a camera that records GPS based location data and then walking home and having the software patch together a 3D viewer. Very cool.