You’re undoubtedly aware that there is computer software that allows you to that pile of photos from, say, your last family trip to the Grand Canyon, and “stitch” them together into one visual experience. These apps are great for creating spiffy digital panorama presentations, for instance.

But you probably don’t about this ubercoolness: a program that takes your vacation photos … and combines them with all the other Grand Canyon pictures available on online photo sharing sites across the globe, to create with an awesome 3D walk-through created from all those photos.

You can do that, right now — and the experience will melt your face, it’s so cool. What’s the name of this face-melting software? Microsoft Live Labs’ Photosynth. Photosynth takes a pile of digital photos from you and others, and creates a stunning visual presentation called a “synth,” Photosynth’s name for these nifty 3D creations.

It’s one thing to read about Photosynth, but it’s far better to see it, so you can grok the cool factor:

(direct link to video)

The applications for this technology transcend vacation photos, of course. You can now immortalize your kid’s giant “class project” diorama (sheesh, that thing was huge!) without actually keeping it forever. You might use it to sell your hand-crafted goods online with a 3D preview. Or maybe you just want to show off the really cool thing you made with LEGOs in an new way.

Behind all this coolness is a technology known as Seadragon. The four philosophies fueling it are deceptively simple:

• The speed of navigation for the end user (that’s you!) is independent of the size or number of objects.
• Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
• Transitions are smooth as butter.
• Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

The Seadragon technology is the brain child of Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a physicist who knows more that a little about image processing. A few years back he and a Princeton University colleague created software to help date old books by analyzing digital images. During the process of studying the Gutenberg Bible they discovered that it could not have been created using punch-cutting techniques, as had previously been believed.

We did mention the guy knows his stuff.

Photosyth is free to use (and although it’s only supported on Windows, it sounds like a Mac version may be available at some point), and all “synths” created are currently public. The Photosyth team just published an easy to follow guide on how to synth a room for the best results.  Why not try it now and leave us a comment showing of your results?

Mined by: Jason “Now I Never Have to Leave Home Again” Penney, via MINE reader Glen Tingle. Thanks, Glen!