Microsoft Photosynth on the Mac with VMware Fusion 2
Just to show everyone how the latest and greatest Windows software will pretty much
always run on a Mac on VMware Fusion, we made a quick video demo of Microsoft’s Photosynth 3d photo visualization product—which supposedly doesn’t run on a Mac, even according to Microsoft!
Late last night I was scanning the Twitter chatter on “VMware Fusion” and saw a bunch of people chatting it up about Microsoft’s new Photosynth 3D photo visualization product. Walt Mossberg has a review of it here.
More the the point, a lot of people were griping about how Photosynth doesn’t work natively on Mac OS X (like a lot of first-release Microsoft products), but moreover, that the only option for running it on a Mac was Windows in Boot Camp. This, according to Microsoft’s own site.
We’ll see about that!
Naturally, I was skeptical, so I fired up my “play around” XP VM, and pulled down the Photosynth installer using Internet Explorer. About five minutes later, I was walking through a 3D Taj Mahal and Stonhenge, on my Mac, with VMware Fusion.
My guess is that the people at Microsoft tried it with VMware Fusion 1.1.3, or maybe in another (gasp!) Mac virtualization product that failed, and just assumed that it would in VMware Fusion too.
Well, on my MacBook Pro I’m running VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2, in which 3D has gotten a lot better (up to DirectX 9 Shader 2!).
You can see more about high performance 3D and 2D video in VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 in the video below, and can download the free beta here.
I tried this with VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 2 with a VM running Vista 64bit and a VM running XP 32bit and neither of them worked.
Is there a special setting I'm missing?
Posted by: Paul Shadwell | August 21, 2008 at 09:57 AM
The VM people on this blog aren't too pleased to answer comments on Vista support. I've tried multiple times to get info on whether the "lot better" 3d support is XP only when all screenshots are from Microsofts old operating system. Never got an answer...
Posted by: Hartvig | August 21, 2008 at 10:23 AM
Photosynth works on Vista as well as XP with VMware Fusion 2. DirectX 9.0 with Shader Model 2 support is greatly improved on both XP and Vista in VMware Fusion 2.0.
Posted by: Pat Lee | August 21, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Tried this with Fusion 2.0 beta 2 and Windows Server 2008. Doesn't work. Apparently the DirectX 3D driver is not loaded at all inside the W2K8 vm, according to `dxdiag`.
Posted by: Henk Poley | August 24, 2008 at 01:34 PM
Would appreciate a more detailed description on the installation. I downloaded and installed VMware-Fusion-2.0.0-113392.dmg on Mac OS X Version 10.5.2. Did not work for me.
Posted by: BHC | August 31, 2008 at 01:38 PM
Forgot to mention, I have Windows XP Pro and a licensed VMware Fusion before the 2.0 beta download.
Posted by: BHC | August 31, 2008 at 01:39 PM
Since upgrading to Fusion 2.0 RC1 PhotoSynth is working in the Vista 64bit VM with changing anything except upgrading the VMWare Tools.
I am having problems with the upgrade on the XP 32bit install which I have posted about elsewhere.
Posted by: Paul Shadwell | September 02, 2008 at 04:57 AM