Microsoft’s innovative Photosynth technology has been integrated into Virtual Earth, marking the first time Photosynth has been available for commercial use.

Photosynth is a tool that lets users upload regular photos and then stitches those photos into 3-D scenes of whatever the photos depict. Our Greg Sterling has previously shown some Photosynth screenshots and called it “pretty amazing stuff.”

Microsoft says that two early customers using Photosynth via its integration with Virtual Earth are NASA and VisitBrighton. Here’s one screenshot of how NASA is using Photosynth to show the International Space Station:

On a more earthly level, in addition to the Brighton Tourism example, you could imagine real estate web sites that already use Virtual Earth for mapping adding the Photosynth technology to show 3-D tours of individual properties. On the Virtual Earth web site, Microsoft also suggests a number of other ways businesses can use Photosynth. You can watch Microsoft’s YouTube video to see all of this in action.

If you’re not a potential business customer, but want to see Photosynth in action, it was integrated into Live Maps late last year. Go virtually to Seattle and look for the Photosynth links in the left content window.

Virtual Earth, which has been somewhat in the shadow of Google Maps and Earth released a large volume of new images for Live Search Maps for a range of countries and cities around the globe.

The imagery allows you to get in very close, so you can see how far your hotel is exactly from the beach in Cannes, for example:

Live Search Maps has not received as much attention as Google Maps but the site has improved greatly over time in terms of usability and accuracy. It’s also much faster than before.

Both Google and Microsoft offer satellite imagery, which is often not that useful to ordinary people in practical situations. Google has StreetView, which can be extremely useful in a range of cases. But Google has nothing between the overhead satellite view and StreetView. Microsoft, despite rumors, doesn’t have a street-level offering (it will over the long term, perhaps through an acquisition) but it does offer a “Birds Eye” view, which as you see in the bottom two images above is much more helpful than satellite imagery.

Since it was introduced more than two years ago, Microsoft’s innovative Photosynth technology has been “under-leveraged.” I’ve written a number of times about Photosynth and its potential. Now, according to an article in Fast Company, Microsoft is going to compete more aggressively with Google StreetView by soliciting user-generated photos and then geotagging and Photosynthing them. The effort is reportedly called “Geosynth”:

Microsoft is going to find its images from someone else, namely, you. Essentially GeoSynth is going to function as a mashup between Microsoft’s Virtual Earth maps system and its PhotoSynth technology.

(See clarification below.)

However, GeoSynth has been around since last October. The new implementation would seem to be a stepped up version of what Microsoft has already been doing. Photosynth images are currently available on Live Search Maps:

When Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye photography launched in 2006 it trumped Google Map’s satellite imagery. But the novelty of that faded when StreetView showed up with the promise of an even closer look at buildings and locations in major cities around the world.

When Google was first developing StreetView Microsoft also was testing StreetSide, a comparable offering that showed similar street-level imagery. It never was formally rolled out. Yet Microsoft apparently has continued to collect this imagery using cars with mounted cameras. None of it has shown up on Live Search Maps (as far as I know).

The Fast Company article suggests that Microsoft is now preparing to make Photosynth a more direct competitor with Google’s StreetView. There are some challenges in doing that that revolve around getting good images from people and making the Photosynth integration with Live Search Maps a bit better, but it’s a very provocative idea.

Update and clarification: I just received the following statement from a Microsoft spokesperson:

“Johannes Kebeck’s comments were taken somewhat out of context. GeoSynth is a standalone version of Photosynth offered by Vexcel that is licensed to public sector companies. There are no immediate plans to integrate GeoSynth into the consumer facing version of Live Search Maps.  Photosynth collections are already included in Live Search Maps in the U.S.”

Google has added geo-tagged Panoramio photos to StreetView images. According to the Google LatLong Blog it’s done automatically:

Google’s image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location.

Google has offered images on Maps for some time, but not directly integrated into StreetView like this.

A thumbnail appears in the upper right of the StreetView image (see below). Clicking it opens a new view of the location with a horizontal scrolling bar of images. Users can click any of the images to enlarge. Google is implying it will only use a limited number of high-quality images for any location.

Currently most locations (that I checked) don’t have this feature. If Google were to add Flickr images, however, to StreetView it would instantly be more populated.

Here’s an example where the new user images do exist, for the Paris monument Arc de Triomphe:

This is additional interesting information in Google Maps and will help reinforce Google’s position as the mapping innovator. However, unknown to most people, Microsoft has this same capability too; and in many ways a much more interesting offering in the combination of Photosynth and Live Search Maps.

Here’s the Live Search Maps result for Arc de Triomphe:

Clicking on “explore collections” in the left panel takes you to a range of Photosynth imagery:

You can then explore the individual “collections” (multiple shots of a single location):

In many cases the range and detail of images (including interiors) is terrific:

Photosynth is a really compelling product but the mainstreaming of Photosynth is moving slowly. While it’s integrated into Live Maps, as I mentioned, nobody seems to know about it. In addition, the experience is more awkward and disintegrated (because it requires a special viewer) than what Google has now put together with Panoramio.

Channel 10 reports Microsoft has integrated Photosynth into Live Maps.

Greg covered Photosynth when it first went public, he described it as a “totally cool” tool that allows Windows users to upload photos, “the technology automatically “synths” them, creating a 3-D, 360-degree interactive photo collage of whatever the photographs depict.”

Microsoft has now integrated it with Live Maps and you can see live examples in Seattle, Vatican city, at the Leaning tower of Pisa and many more places. Greg Sterling posted additional screen captures at his personal blog.

In other Microsoft mapping news, they have added 41.07 TB worth of Virtual Earth imagery. The Microsoft Virtual Earth blog details exactly which locations have been updated. The images look crisp and sharp to me.

Microsoft’s Photosynth is morphing from a Microsoft Live Labs experiment — featured on the BBC’s “How We Built Britain” television series and in select other rarefied contexts — to what can only be described as a “totally cool” consumer application.

I’ve always been intrigued by Photosynth, since its introduction in late 2006, and what Microsoft might do with it. The consumer release is only the beginning; there are myriad academic, educational and potential commercial uses of the technology.

On the new consumer site, you can upload your photos — it only works on Windows machines (XP or Vista) but works with Firefox — and the technology automatically “synths” them, creating a 3-D, 360-degree interactive photo collage of whatever the photographs depict. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

Here are some screens of a “synth” of Seattle’s Safeco Field (which really don’t do justice to Photosynth):

Here’s one of an art gallery:

These are still images, but there’s something very “cinematic” about Photosynth. But unlike video the user can pan or zoom in on any individual image. It can thus go from very “macro” views to extreme closeups. One can imagine it as a new kind of “storytelling” medium.

The only thing vaguely similar to it is mapping site EveryScape, which takes still photographs and knits them together into a virtual version of real cities. There are intriguing ways in which sites like EveryScape or Microsoft’s own Virtual Earth can integrate Photosynth’s capabilities.

Photosynth is an exciting product but not yet as developed as Microsoft envisions. I asked Microsoft, for example, whether Flickr users could upload photos directly from their accounts into Photosynth — “not yet” was the answer. Such upgrades and developments are on the roadmap.

I’d love to see a Mac plug-in that allowed Mac users to participate as well. But putting those quibbles aside, Photosynth is one of the most compelling and genuinely unique products to come out of Redmond (other than Surface) in a long time.