Create Your Own Virtual Tours with Photosynth

Photosynth wowed audiences a couple years ago when we showed how a set of photos can be stitched together electronically to create a virtual walkthrough. Now, Photosynth has been expanded so you can create a synth of your own.

Photosynth provides a new medium for you to communicate to customers. Whether that be a product walkthrough or real estate listing or sharing your own vacation viewscapes.

Use your own digital camera and Live ID, download the 8-meg Photosynth software and you too can begin building synths. Take between 10 and 300 pictures from all angles and Photosynth will create a virtual walkthrough of whatever it is you shoot.

For now, all synths are public. Each free account gets up to 20 gigabytes of storage — enough for 20,000, 1-megabyte digital photos.

To get a flavor of the technology, check out photosynth.net. The service currently supports Windows XP and Vista only. And there are a lot of synths online, including some from National Geographic.