BERKELEY, California – Two technologies demonstrated at the International Virtual Reality Photography Conference over the weekend come close to delivering the amazing imaging technologies used in Blade Runner to zoom deep into pictures and explore them from different angles.

Both developed by Microsoft, one application allows viewers to zoom deep into gigantic, gigapixel panoramic images. A sweeping view of downtown Seattle and the Puget Sound can be enlarged to show diners sitting in the Space Needle. Another application constructs 3-D objects from hundreds of ordinary 2-D photographs, allowing the object to be explored from any angle.

The most impressive demonstration at Sunday’s IVRPC seminar was Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs – a program that constructs large-scale, 3-D models of objects like buildings from hundreds of still photographs.

Using a mouse, viewers can walk in – and around – the 3-D model, looking at the object from almost any angle. Viewers can isolate individual shots, and quickly zoom into the tiniest details with a roll of the mouse scroll wheel. (Online demos available here require Windows XP SP2 or Vista).

One reconstructed scene showed the Trevi fountain in Rome, stitched together from 350 photographs scraped from Flickr. The immersive scene incorporated images shot with everything from cell-phone cameras to high-end SLRs.

Another 3-D panorama reconstructed the lavish Gyeongbokgung palace in Seoul, Korea, integrating both professional shots and photographs submitted by amateurs.

“You can actually jump into the images,” remarked Drew Steedly, a scientist with Microsoft Live Labs.

Photosynth uses a visual algorithm to scan through hundreds of images, hunting for distinctive features. After identifying features common to different pictures – doors, windows and sculptures – the program links the photos together and calculates the 3-D position of each picture.

The technique is similar to depth perception – where the brain combines different views from each eye into one seamless 3-D view. In Photosynth, the system establishes a "point-cloud" for each photograph space, and then stitches the latticework of images to create a dazzlingly seamless three-dimensional interactive environment ready for exploration.

"We’re working on releasing something where you could make your own collection,” said Steedly, although when pressed, he admitted there's no timetable for the public rollout of Photosynth.

Matt Uyttendaele of Microsoft Research showed off HD View, a high-definition panoramic viewer that can handle monster panoramic shots, often several gigapixels big.

The browser-based viewer provides an immersive wide-angle view, up to 360 degrees, and is capable of displaying images composed of billions of pixels. (Again, the technology requires XP or Vista).

The sweeping panorama of Seattle was composed of 800 images taken with a zoom camera mounted on a motorized telescope tripod. The tripod stepped the camera across the panorama as it captured a mosaic of 20 megapixel images.

"Its pretty amazing, details in the JPEG images that you don’t even realize are there," said Uyttendaele. "It’s just another dimension to exploring these really large images."

Currently available only for Windows, a new version of HD View will be released in a few weeks that adds tone mapping, which sharpens images by automatically removing atmospheric haze.

“We’re encouraging people to try this out if they want,” said Uyttendaele.