A group of computer scientists from the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory have created an algorithm that improves the technology behind Microsoft’s Photosynth to render massive environments in 3D.

Microsoft’s Photosynth technology originally debuted two years ago, but it continues to impress us with its implications for photography in user generated digital environments.  When the developer, Aguera y Arcas, spoke to the crowd at the 2007 TED conference, he described the Photosynth project as taking “data from the entire collective memory of what the earth looks like…All of those photos become linked together, and they make something emergent—greater than the sum of their parts.”
Photosynth technology was recently seen implemented on a massive scale during the inauguration, when CNN asked viewers to contribute their own photos to create an enormous [...]

At the Adobe MAX conference in Milan earlier this month, an experimental project called Infinite Images. The project enables a unique navigation of a tagged photography database.  Drawing on the tagging system, a user can automatically create a seamless 3D world that spans an endless set of photos.  The navigation effect is similar to falling into an M. C. Escher drawing and the creator describes it as using “each image as a gateway to a photo realistic world.”  The examples used in the presentation seem to be most effective when dealing with simple images like wide landscapes or set tags [...]