fotowoosh is a service similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth. The idea of fotowoosh is to build a 3D image from a single 2D one whilst the idea of Photosynth is to comprise a 3D image from many 2D ones. Photosynth’s is more impressive, but I expect much harder.

Neither fotowoosh or Photosynth are public yet; fotowoosh is in private alpha and Photosynth is still in Tech Preview.

Photosynth uses a proprietary Microsoft format when fotowoosh uses VRML (which can be viewed through a browser plug-in on Win32, Linux and PowerPC Macs). It is far from perfect (which one would expect from it considering there’s only 1 source image) yet I think when you are looking at parts of the image in the distance the 3D effect is pretty cool. Sadly, when you are looking at things which are closer they appear distorted.

fotowoosh is owned by free webhost FreeWebs (which appears to have had a Web 2.0 re-design complete with reflections and CSS tabs since the last time I visited it). The design of fotowoosh itself is blatantly Web 2.0 as it has gradients and ‘alpha’ in a star with rounded corners!

fotowoosh doesn’t allow users themselves to make VRMLs yet but I’m sure this technology will come as it enters beta. This is also no different to Photosynth which also limits users to viewing samples.

TechCrunch has a much better post about the service.

Tags: fotowoosh, photos, web2.0, web 2.0, web2, web 2, graphics, 3d