Turning photos into a 3D tour. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Microsoft Live Labs has created technology it calls Photosynth....and is making it available to the public for free. Labs Architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas ...

"Photosynth is about taking a set of photos that are shot in a common space, in a common environment, and figuring out the relationships between them geometrically and allowing you to navigate those photos in three dimensional space. So this is actually sort of an inverse problem. If you think about the field of graphics in 3D, this is about taking a three dimensional model of space and rendering two dimensional images from that model."

All you really need to know is it's very cool. The behind the scenes technology does all of the work once you've downloaded the plug-in application and selected your pictures....

"And we hit the Synth button. And now what's going on is that the software on this computer is actually doing the computer vision problem. It's figuring out the relationships among those images and registering them together and doing three dimensional reconstruction and finding the navigational links."

What may take some practice...is snapping the right kinds of photos that will create the best Photosynth experience. The creations are stored on the Photosynth site...not your computer. You can share them through a link...

"We're going to give anybody who signs up for this thing 20 gigs of space to play with."

You can find more information and give it a try at live.labs.com/photosynth. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.