It's a small green shed with windows, and it's just one of the many nooks of the world you can poke around and take a virtual tour of on the Photosynth.net web site. You can even click through and look inside the shed.

It's not clear who Rick is, but he's just one of many users who have uploaded a series of images of a location -- from various angles, spanning a region -- that Microsoft's Photosynth tool has melded together to form a single, navigable three-dimensional image. Users have to download the Photosynth software to allow them to view the images, but download is free on the Photosynth.net site.

The tool, originally a Microsoft's Research project, installs a Web-browser and the application, Photosynth, to view them.

It 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.

The tool began accepting uploads from users yesterday, and by 1 a.m. PT more than 7727 synths had been created with 286,689 images, according to Microsoft's Photosynth blog. In putting so many images up, however, users crashed the system and Microsoft had to scramble in the evening to get it back online.