The India Digital Heritage Project is a huge undertaking by Microsoft Research India that tries to collect, store, and share data on architectural sites and stimulate research in visualization, computer vision, graphics and related fields.
Various academic and industry research organizations formed a Program Advisory & Monitoring Committee to monitor the project. MSR India's role is to provide technologies such as Photosynth and HD View (the latter at its beta) to help showcase various Indian heritage sites in both 2D and 3D. At the moment, the project encompasses five sites with either Photosynth or HD View (beta) examples (example in the vid below).
Users can choose to follow a "guided-tour" where a narrator explains the historical and cultural importance of what is being viewed. As you can see, the potential of this project is really phenomenal. Slideshows of pictures and videos really aren't enough for digital tours of landmarks but putting together technologies like Photosynth and HD View (beta) can seriously improve the experience. The engineers, researchers, and designers that had to work to put this together have only recently finished a pilot prototype for the Sri Andal Temple in Srivilliputtur.
HD View, developed by Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media group, is a viewer meant for large images (think billions of pixels) that have been stitched together using smaller images. Photosynth, on the other hand, is a technology that analyzes and pieces together multiple images of an area or object from multiple angles to create virtual worlds called a "synth." The latter has actually undergone an update recently, with "a lot more features and improvements in the works."
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