> Microsoft really does have some great engineering talent

Not to dispute this--they certainly do.

But sadly for Microsoft, Blaise Agüera y Arcas (one of the creators of the original Photosynth) just left MS for Google in December.

https://twitter.com/blaiseaguera/status/412503266061074432

Microsoft is always doing incredible research, just depressing that it's rarely converted into a compelling consumer product.

Well, Ballmer's gone. So maybe they will figure out how to pull together their innovation. It is kind of deflating sometimes to realize that MS was doing something that they simply dropped the ball on. The smart phone is solidly one of those things. They dominated the PDA market prior to the iPhone coming out. All they had to do was put some focus towards it.

They were also ahead of the curve with tablets. Bill Gates demoed a tablet in 2000: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-248474.html

The first photosynth iOS app was pretty cool and really well made when it was first released. Hopefully it'll be updated with this new 3d stuff!

I remember it used to seriously limit the resolution of the pictures though. You'd stitch together lots of high-res photos and yet the app would merge them into a low-res output. I wonder if they ever changed that?

If I remember correctly, that only occurred if the panorama was extremely wide or extremely tall in aspect ratio. I think it had a limit for the maximum dimension. But I remember exporting approximately 4:3 panoramas that were quite large.