Photosynth, the much-anticipated three-dimensional photo experience from Microsoft Live Labs, has finally launched. "Synths," as they're called, are series of photos stitched together by a fancy algorithm that compares them to one another to create an immersive 360-degree viewing experience. You can start exploring Photosynth on most Windows PCs (and some Macs running virtual machines) now.

Photosynth is integrated with Live Maps, as well, so you can view other people's synths of various locations, right from the map. That's what's causing people to compare Photosynth to Google Street View, which is the closest product out there right now. But Google Street View doesn't let you create anything on your own, with a regular digital camera. Keep an eye on Photosynth as -- I know this is clichéd, but it may be true -- a game-changing technology.

Microsoft and NASA have released high resolution images of the space shuttle Endeavor. Microsoft's Photosynth web viewer stitches together hundreds of high quality images to present a 3D view of items including Endeavor at the launch pad, the space shuttle Atlantis, and NASA's vehicle assembly building.

All told, there are four image libraries made up of thousands of images. To be honest, the interface is a little confusing at first. As you click on the arrows and images, you move from one photo to another. But after you get the hang of it, you can drag and drop the images, smoothly zoom in and out of photos, and flip between alternate views of the space shuttle.

It's not your usual 3D display, in that you can't easily get a 360 degree view of the space shuttle just by dragging your mouse, but the photos are stitched together in such a way that you can see pretty much all there is to see, right down to the people working on the launch pad.

Microsoft Research has pushed out some questionable stuff in the past, but I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Microsoft maintaining a world-renowned R&D group that hearkens back to the days when Xerox did the same thing. And even if not everything they generate is a gem, sometimes they produce something that you can't help but look at, and say "wow". Photosynth is that sort of product.

Not yet commercially available, this is simply a technical preview, but one that is well worth your time to play with. The basic idea behind Photosynth is that it can take a set of photographs and analyze them for graphical similarities, then use the resulting data set to reconstruct a 3-dimensional space with the images mapped onto it. While that's a relatively decent description of what it does, you really can't understand Photosynth until you see it (and play with it) in action.

The technical preview site offers four locations to explore: Gary Faigin Studio, Piazza San Marco in Venice, Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and Piazza San Pietro in Rome. While the outdoor locations are impressive as expected, I was pleasantly surprised by the experience of wandering through an art studio using this software.

It might not be immediately apparent, but the photographs used for this project are extremely high-resolution, so you will find that you can zoom way in and see some pretty impressive details. Zooming out provides you with the context of the entire environment, which is somehow reassuring. In some ways, it reminds me of the incredible demonstration given by Jeff Han at TedTalks - when I imagine exploring Photosynth with a user interface like the one Jeff has developed, I want the future to be now.

One disclaimer - to play with Photosynth, you'll need to use Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and install the ActiveX component that does the heavy lifting. It's not clear to me that this needed to be done in a browser, but at the same time it doesn't take anything away from the experience having it there.

I couldn't think of a more descriptive title, because Microsoft's Photosynth is a little difficult to pin down. It's a product of Microsoft Live Labs that "takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space." In case that's not 100% enlightening, I recommend checking out the videos on the Photosynth site. Photosynth definitely looks cool--in fact it even looks a little sci-fi-- but is there anything to it beyond the wow-factor? What are people in the real world intended to use it for? Well, we have a while to figure it out, I think, since the site is very coy about when we'll be able to actually download it.