Entire Cities Recreated Using Thousands of Flickr Photos

This comment republishing feature is annoying -- I do not give anyone permission to copy my work here to other sites. The use of the Y Combinator logo is also suspect; I do not speak for YC when I post here (or ever), so I am not sure why my comments would have a YC logo on them.<p>Anyway, commenting on the actual content... I guess the algorithm builds 3D models of structures from the photo. Initially, I thought it would generate something like Street View. It seems possible to use the 3d dot model in addition to the photos to create a "photorealistic" virtual world -- has anyone done this? (This article is very low on details.)

Its very similar to what you can do with Microsofts Photosynth, just on a greater scale. MS lets you upload a couple hundred pictures, which is enough for a similar 3D dot model for a single building.

I am very impressed with this project. In my opinion this is even better than Google Maps, which relies on hand modeled structures. I'd like to see Google implement Flickr reconstructions so that even if no one has hand modeled buildings there will still be 3D structures there when you zoom in.<p>Naturally not every place will have such a high photo density but there must be a lot of cities and tourist sites that can be reconstructed in a similar manner.

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See also: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731412" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731412</a><p>I thought there were more items submitted at about the same time, but I haven't been able to find them.<p>It is very clever.