University of Washington and Microsoft are working together to create a new way to browse photos. This is different from the Photosynth [microsoft labs] technology in that angles and positions are being analyzed and so pictures can be related to each other.

By doing this it is possible to ”zoom” in infinitely through the world, visiting famous places or just someones living room. Check out this demonstration video.

However, I have serious doubts that this technology will work well in the real world or become a useful product. It is one thing if you have geotagged photographs (that also contains information on bearing and azimuth) but it is a completely different thing on just analyzing the content of the photographs. For example a Volvo S40 car would look just the same in Brazil as it would in Jordan and there are some temples in Greece that are built as replicas of others, to accurately depict them would mean a lot of manual labour unless we can take a new step in geotagging of course.