Reality is a virtual certainty

Darren Cronian at the Travel Rants blog got in touch earlier this week to point us in the direction of some technology being developed by Microsoft.

The computer giant’s Live Labs (Oh to have their R&D budget – Ed) have been playing around with a new gizmo called Photosynth, a three-dimensional way of linking images from the web to create virtual tours of cities or attractions.

Once fully developed, the system will allow users to “walk or fly” through a destination from any angle; zoom in and out of locations; and carry out customised tours.

The production values [demo here, with a walk through by one of the developers] are frighteningly high, although the Microsoft computers are clearly rendering the images at a far higher speed than your average home computer with a 1mb broadband connection.

“We are going to see a collision of the real world and the virtual world that will create this incredible experience that people can go and visit and get a sense of things they’ve never really seen before,” says principal researcher Rick Szeliski.

Right, back to flicking through that brochure I picked up earlier…

Kevin May, editor, Travolution