Photosynth

I depend on my Number One Son to keep me up on technology. Here is a video he directed me to that explains Photosynth, I give up on making it link properly, here is the URL:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html
which if you are not up on the latest and greatest, is a really astonishing thing, er, medium, er, software, er, way to look at things. What really impresses me is the collaborative nature of the sources: basically all the photos of a certain site (Trafalgar Square for instance) that everyone, pro or amateur, puts online (say on Flickr) are overlaid like a big mosaic. Microsoft has a few sites set up experimentally, so that you can tour those places the way Google Earth does, but in more detail.

The artist's studio they used as an example has a close relation to Lewis' Garageography that I mentioned yesterday, or what it might look like in the near future. (Or maybe in the future artists' studios will look more like Lewis' garage, I dunno.)

And then the BBC has started to get the population of Britain to photograph the stately homes and tourist sites and such. You can look at Ely cathedral. The whole island could be virtual in pretty short order.