This is just cool. It’s a video of a talk at this year’s TED conference (one of the few conferences I’m truly interested in attending…but not $6000 interested) by a very smart fellow named Blaise Aguera y Arcas in which he demonstrates software he (and his team?) have built called Photosynth (link takes you to the demo site for it). The most impressive part of the video, to me, is where Blaise shows how they scraped lots of photos of Notre Dame off Flickr and used those photos to procedurally build a sort of 3d model of Notre Dame. Google Streetview is awesome but it’s very Web 1.0, for lack of a better word. Google sends people out to take photos at street-level of various locations and as a result you can view a city from street level in the places Google chose to send people to.

Photosynth, on the other hand, works from any and all photos, procedurally. Want to reconstruct St. Mark’s Square in Venice? Scrape a couple thousand photos of it from Flickr and you’re off to the races. I’m not sure what the limits of it are but even places that are not frequently photographed could possibly be reconstructed, especially in combination with scene completion technology like this.