The witty rodents in the burrows of Microsoft's volish Live Labs have coded up a new photo application with sweaty paws and named it Photosynth.

Photosynth makes it possible to turn bog-normal photographs of any place one deemed worthy of photographing into wondrous 3D landscapes. According to the Vole's minor rodents, one shall be able to share 'in the same sense of exhilaration and wonder, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos'.

Naturally, such wonderments require a bit of work. It is necessary to take 'a few dozen photos', namely 20 to 300 depending on the scale of what is being photographed, from various angles and locations. The photos also have to overlap. Twenty shots might be enough for a desk or dorm room, but 300 sounds like a lot of work if it's the outside of Notre Dame in Paris or the Acropolis of Athens. Photos can be marked and uploaded to the Photosynth site using a client. Photosynth then crunches its numbers and conjures up a detailed, 3D view of the site with all its bumps and glitches.

Photosynth Users can create communities, grab their mates photos of one particular site to make a synth and share the result on social not-working sites, blogs or any place which allows HTML to be embedded. Mac users will need to have boot camp on their object of desire, Photosynth won't run under any virtual machines software.

Microsoft states 256MB memory is a bare minimum and highly recommends 1GB. The software will run on a few DirectX 6 cards, however DirectX 7 and above is no problem.

Site and software can be accessed here. X