Picture Cloud: poor-man's 3D photo rendering

While you wait for Microsoft to release its gabillion-dollar 3D photo research project, Photosynth, you might want to check out the one-person project, Picture Cloud. Photosynth will attempt to place all photos into a global context so that you can fly through them. Picture Cloud just uses pictures you've taken while walking around an object and mashes them together into kind of a poor man's QuickTime spinning view of an object.

It's a cool service for showing off things you're trying to sell, such as cars or clothes. Picture Cloud images look very easy to create--you just drag your images into the site. However, the service doesn't yet do any smart image processing. So if you take your walkaround shots out of order, you'll ruin the illusion.

There's a free version of the service as well as a paid option that gives you more resolution and longer storage life.

Seen at: New Tech Meetup