How to make and share Panoramas more easily – Microsoft ICE + Photosynth

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I was working on a post about scanned images – in fact it’s the same set of scanned images I was using in this earlier post. In that post I talked about putting Panoramas into SilverLight Deep Zoom

The teams behind Microsoft ICE* – (the Image Composite and Editing tool) and Photosynth have worked together so the newest version of ICE can upload its results into Photosynth: Photosynth is driven by deep zoom so I don’t have to any work to get a shared, zoomable panorama, with Geotagging thrown in. This is not the only great new addition to ICE** it has support for mechanised capture devices which produce an ordered grid or as ICE terms it a structured panorama. You can read more on the HDview blog and on the Photosynth blog (Matt mentions that the ability to see Geotagged panoramas on the same map as Geotagged synths isn’t there yet, but is coming – and I’ve got another post in the pipeline about Geotagging photos) .

I put together a little video to show just how easy the process is (if the embedded video doesn’t work properly, you can view it in its original location) - at 1280x720 resolution it doesn’t really do Photosyth’s viewer justice.  You can click the version below and hit the button on the right for the full screen view to see just why I like it so much. I have a couple more panoramas which I will rebuild and upload.

* Should I proud of myself for not making any contrived “ICEmen” jokes ?
** I could have said cool new thing in ICE .