Funky new image technology (ignore the advert for about the first 30 seconds)

'Photosynth' (from about 2:50 mins onwards) is the really exciting thing. The software has found the vanishing points in various photographs and extrapolated, building up a 3D view. Wait 'til their Notre Dame demo, for it is much with the blowing-off of the socks.

It made me wonder

1. what would happen if Google Earth got their hands on it
2. how they'll deal with the major downside to UGC, namely that you get fifty million near-identical copies of what people en masse consider interesting, and no views of the back of the building
3. how the software would cope with things that are broadly rotationally symmetrical, like the Eiffel Tower and whatnot

It's also a good answer to the question I wonder about: what can anyone usefully do with all the largely unremarkable junk people shove on places like Flickr? (Sorry; my web 1.0, skills-and-formal-education-valuing side is showing again. But my serious point is that there's a desperate need for metadata of some kind to make sense, and use, of all these burgeoning resources.)

Microsoft's blurb page - although this is (according to some blokes on the geeky mailing list I got this from) not a Microsoft product itself but a small research company/project/thingy the corp has bought.