Microsoft on Wednesday opened up its Photosynth 3D photo offering to the public.

Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs them in a 3D environment. It could take Flickr photos of a monument like Notre Dame Cathedral from hundreds of separate accounts and compile them into one, continuous shot of the cathedral and its surroundings.

Users can install Photosynth at photosynth.com. All photos that are added to the site will be public and visible to anyone on the Internet. It is currently only available on Windows-based machines running XP and Vista, and users will have to sign up for a Windows Live ID to access Photosynth.

Microsoft first previewed Photosynth at its 2006 financial analyst meeting, several months after it acquired Seattle-based Seadragon Software, which developed technology to display large images on computers and handheld devices. Microsoft later previewed a more in-depth look at last year’s TED conference.

Source: PC Magazine

Dissatisfaction with the original version of Windows Vista has prompted an overwhelming majority of users to download and install the operating system’s first service pack, according to a group of researchers.

Industry watchers at Devil Mountain Software said 86% of Vista users had installed SP1 as of the end of July, compared to the 69% of Vista users that were running SP1 at the end of April.

“There was tremendous pent up demand for Vista SP1,” said the researchers, in a blog post Thursday.

The high adoption rate is “either due to customer dissatisfaction with the product or because users were convinced of its benefits from all of the media hype surrounding its release,” wrote the research team.

Microsoft made Vista SP1 available as a free download from its Web site in March. It’s also been slipstreamed into boxed versions of Windows Vista available from Amazon.com and other retailers.
Source: InformationWeek