Two researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, US, Noah Snavely and Steven Seitz, in collaboration with Microsoft have developed a special software tool that is able to create a patchwork out of your personal photographs and then generate a 3D image. The invention will be showcased at Siggraph computer graphics conference in Boston, where Microsoft has produced a video showing the software in action.

What is very important is the fact that anyone can use the software as long as it has a computer and digital photos. The tool is called Photosynth and it chooses the pictures one by one, analyzes each one of them and then finds a match. The next step is to stitch them up to create a 3D image. "It's like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience," says Szeliski, manager of the Interactive Visual Media Group at Microsoft Research in Washington, US. "This is a revolutionary way for people to interact with photos in a 3D context that more closely resembles the place where the images were captured."

More precisely, the program first finds distinctive features of each image, as it can also determine the position of the camera when it has taken the snap shot. Then it creates a web based on the similarities of the images that looks like "as if each picture has been projected from its original camera position in three dimensions".

If a user, for example, uploads a series of holiday images featuring the same landmark they should be able to explore it virtually in three dimensions and zoom in to see more features in close up. "It sounds very clever," says John Carter, an expert in computer vision at the University of Southampton in the UK, but he notes that its usefulness will only be proven over time.