Photo Tourism 3D-Photo Browser Knocks Spots Off Plain-Old Slideshows

This video, shown at SIGGRAPH, demos a re-invention of how to navigate collections of photos. It’s the work of a team from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research, using advanced processing to magically create 3D-like environments to explore photos of places and things. The amazing results will, inevitably, invoke a “that’s like Minority Report” sensation in you. Currently the team sees the system as useful for photo tourism, using “community photos” from a source like Flickr. But with each of us snapping photos all the time on our digital cams, I’d like to think it’s the way you may browse your photo collection in the future. [Phototourism via Crunchgear]