Adam Sheppard, Microsoft Live Labs Group Manager, provides a post-SIGGRAPH 2006 update regarding the overall response from the community, press, and conference attendees towards the Photosynth technology, as well as the expected timeline and functionality of the initial public release of Photosynth:

One of the questions we’re often asked is when people will be able to create their own 3D collections. This is something we’re absolutely committed to but will not be available in our first external release. Photosynth currently requires a large number of CPU cycles to perform the matching between images and for larger datasets this can take hours or sometimes days of processing. We are exploring a number of methods for drastically reducing this processing time but want to ensure that people realize that we’re a technology that is evolving in real-time and we want to incrementally build towards the vision of a world of interconnected images through collaboration and participation from the online community.

To that end we will be releasing an ActiveX browser control this fall that will allow you to explore a number of interesting, processed collections. We showed an early build of this at our SIGGRAPH booth and many people gave us feedback on the interface that we’re currently incorporating. This build will also include the amazing multi-resolution, zoom and navigation capabilities of SeaDragon which is an experience unto itself!