We’re pleased to announce the first full release of Photosynth, available now at photosynth.com . Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment. For those of you who have seen the videos or tried our tech preview, you could experience synths that we made in the lab and get a feel for what Photosynth is and how it works. But now, for the first time ever you can create synths from your own pictures and share them with your friends. Explore

- by Jeff Greene Detective Stella Bonasera (Melina Kanakaredes) and computer expert Adam Ross (A.J. Buckley) use Photosynth to investigate the death of a New York prep school guidance counselor on CSI: New York Wednesday night on CBS. Photo: Randy Tepper, CBS Demonstrating that Microsoft Research projects have potential real-world applications, Photosynth , imaging software developed by Microsoft Live Labs, is featured prominently and accurately in this Wednesday's episode of CSI: New York ( Season

There’s a reason everyone’s sending you links to Photosynth . It presents the most astounding possibilities of any technology I’ve seen. Even playing with it myself I can’t believe it’s real. Using photos of frequently photographed places ( NASA Space Shuttle , Piazza San Pietro, Rome , Gyeongbok Palace in Korea ) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that will stretch your mind. Check

The Photosynth Team describes a "hidden" switch that activates Autoplay on a Photosynth collection , triggering Photosynth to automatically advance through the images in a tour that will take you through every photo in the set. Rob La Gesse, in the comments of the Photosynth blog, describes a VB6 app that he whipped up to turn Photosynth into a screen saver. Rob, I covet your screen saver! Could you post it somewhere? :) [Update: I wrote a PhotoSynth screensaver ]

The first Photosynth technology preview has hit the web! Today, you can visit the Photosynth site to explore four different collections of photos in 3D space. Back in August, the Photosynth team announced their work at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference, along with a lot of amazing Microsoft research into visualization . And now, just a few months later, if you're using IE6 or IE7 you can try it yourself! (Let me pre-empt the inevitable comment: the Photosynth team makes very clear that they intend to