Microsoft's Photosynth has finally gone live after a technical hitch on its launch day caused the site to go down for hours. Microsoft said on the Live Labs blog that demand had been simply overwhelming and that Photosynth.com had momentarily been switched to a special static/read-only mode.

PhotoSynth allows users to combine an array of photos of a single location into a navigable, three-dimensional image called a "synth" and upload it to Photosynth.net to share with the world. The technology, which originated in a Microsoft Research project, is an altogether new way of putting photographs together.

All synths that get uploaded, as of now, are open for public viewing, though people can choose to copyright their synths, make them available for use under the Created Commons license or place them in public domain. Users can rate and comment on each other's synths. Synths can also be embedded into a third party Web site. Going forward, users might be able to restrict synths to a smaller group of people.

The tool makes heavy use of a computer's graphics hardware, so it may not run on older systems, according to Microsoft. Graphics acceleration has to be set to full. It will run on Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 or 3, and only on machines running Windows XP or Windows Vista. On the Mac platform, Photosynth runs only under Boot Camp and won't work if users are running Parallels or other desktop virtualization software.

In another blog post, the Live Labs team warned users that, as Photosynth is still at its first steps, some bugs or hiccups are likely to be encountered. The team then encourages the service’s users to inform the company on any ideas they may have or on any bugs they may find.

For now, PhotoSynth is a consumer product, but Microsoft sees potential for commercial uses as well. "If you think about the commerce scenarios, you have this ability to provide a generalized overview of that that you might not have been able to before," said Alex Daley, group product manager for Live Labs.