This is probably the first synth ever shot and knit together.
I was in Prague in May 2004 for the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) and I wanted to capture the beautiful old town square in a way that was more immersive and three-dimensional than the panoramas I had been shooting (and stitching) until then.
I decided to walk around the perimiter shooting overlapped photos of the building facades, as well as taking a few panoramas to "link" everything together.
When I got back to Seattle, I started collaborating with Noah Snavely and Steve Seitz at the University of Washington on these ideas. Noah was able to create the world's first synth (we were calling them "photo tours") from this data.
We later hit upon the idea of using photos from the Web to achieve the same effect. A few months later, we had the first working "Photo Tourism" system (http://research.microsoft.com/IVM/PhotoTours/), which we presented at SIGGRAPH 2006 and which eventually led to the creation of Photosynth.
See if you can find the panorama taken while walking arond the fountain. (Click on the little globe to see the overall lay of the square.) There's a second 3D group taken from the clock tower (use the "Next 3D Group" button in the URH corner).
Enjoy! Rick