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.