There was an extraordinary video of a presentation from the TED 2007 conference on a new technology called Photosynth. Photosynth is a program that scrapes a photo site such as Flickr to find thousands of pictures that have been uploaded and tagged by users. It then links photos with common tags into a giant collage and allows the user to navigate around a virtual reconstruction of the environment by viewing real photographs taken by others. In order to get a true understanding of Photosynth you really need to watch the video.

The potential for the application is huge and as Blaise Aguera points out in his presentation, the beauty of this technology is how it leverages collective intelligence. It has the ability to create vibrant virtual models of every interesting environment on the planet, and all from vacation photographs on Flickr.

I have tried to assmble a sampling of how the technology works in a series of photos below, but it doesn’t really do it justice. You can see as you zoom in through a myriad of photos of the Piazza San Marco you go from the middle of the square to a close up view of some of the architectural detail. If you want to experiment for yourself you can try the technology at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/. And believe it or not it was developed by Microsoft.