Another Flickr toy - this one is better

We like to bitch quite a bit about how we were supposed to have flying cars by now. Each time I start a discussion about automobiles that starts to focus on gas mileage, hybrid or alternative fuel technology, crash ratings, or CD changers, it almost inevitably degenerates into some oddly jealous rant about "why can't we be more like the Jetsons?" Once in a while something like this comes along that makes you think we're taking little baby steps towards eye-popping technologies that defined that cartoon - technologies we know we want, but we can't yet have.

Here is one such technology. It's more of a toy than anything right now, but when you start to take tools like Digg and Flickr and combine them to make something like Microsoft Photosynth, we're inching closer to creating a collective consciousness (or, more accurately, a group mind) that can actually be seen and felt.

Microsoft's official description of Photosynth:

A Photosynth experience begins with nothing more than a bunch of digital photos. They might all have been taken by one person, or they might be a mixture of images from many different cameras, shooting conditions, dates, times of day, resolutions, and so on.

Each photo is processed by computer vision algorithms to extract hundreds of distinctive features, like the corner of a window frame or a door handle. Photos that share features are then linked together in a web. When the same feature is found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated. It's similar to depth perception - what your brain does to perceive the 3D positions of things in your field of view based on their images in both of your eyes. Photosynth's 3D model is just the cloud of points showing where those features are in space.

Imagine a slide projector placed at each original camera position, aimed how the camera was, and projecting the picture that camera took. A screen is placed in the 3D environment at an appropriate distance from the projector. As you move around in the Photosynth environment, projectors turn on and off, giving you a changing perspective on a world built entirely out of the original photos.

You have to hand it to Microsoft on this one. They're starting to match things like Google Maps Streetview and Apple's iPhone tit-for-tat. Before you do anything else, you should watch the video of the demo. Then head over to Photosynth and try it yourself.

Video: [Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo]
Link: [Microsoft Photosynth]