This is too awesome. Say you're on vacation and you take 600 photos. Currently, you can put your photos online, add captions to them, and more recently, map them. But if you watch this video, you'll see how what we can do now is just the tip of the iceberg. What if some software could compare your photos to others' photos online (say on Flickr), and then automatically tag/map the pictures for you?

Taking it a step further, all the photos could be collected, yours and many others, and combined to form images that get much higher resolution (because each photo will have different zoom levels, amount of detail captured, area of buildings captured, etc. Then the resulting image would not only be much higher resolution, but it could also be mapped in 3D. By analyzing each photo, software can not only see which ones are similar, but they can actually tell what angle/perspective the photo was taken from.

The best part of all this is it is not all pie in the sky. It's already being done with isolated data/photosets, and it's just a matter of time before it becomes available to us all to do with our own photos. Because the more photos you have, the more detailed/complete the end result is. So it's in these companies' interests to allow you to use the software on your own photos too.



Microsoft's Photosynth has an awesome demo online. There's also a site called Fotowoosh doing something similar...though it primarily makes your (single) 2D photos into 3D.