If you already know about Photosynth, skip to the next paragraph.  Photosynth is a phenomenal concept born out of Washington University Microsoft Research with more than 10 years of research.  It is a fantastic way to pick tons of photographs of a monument, building, object, room or anything else and creates a 3D fly-through experience of browsing the photos.  Of course, these photographs can be taken by different people, through different cameras, at different seasons, different times of the day, with different people in front, etc.  For details of the technology working, see Photo-Tourism at Washington Edu.

Photosynth has been in technical preview for a couple of years (or more) now.  The preview allowed people to view "synths" created and published by the Photosynth team, but no way to create their own synths.  The team has just released an all-new viewing experience as well as a full-fledged tool to create synths of your own and share it with the world.

The tool and experiences can be found at the brand new Photosynth community site at www.photosynth.net

Here's a synth (yes, you can embed them now) of the Taj Mahal:

And here's something that struck me as funny - an innovative use of Photosynth - now this is what happens when you put stuff out to community, the possibilities seem endless:

And the work is not done yet!  At SIGGRAPH 2008, the team demonstrated some new work titled "Finding Paths through the World's Photos".  It showcases a unique blend of bringing your own photographs along with community photographs to create experiences that are unparalleled.  Check out the demo in this video:

All of the ongoing work can be followed at http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/