Media artist Michael Naimark and his colleagues developed a system to "Flickrize" Google Earth. The Viewfinder tool not only enables photos to be placed in the right geolocation on a 3D model like Google Earth, but "poses" them at the correct angle. The video demo is fantastic. From the Viewfinder project page:
“Geotagged” photos, geographically indexed on a world map, either manually or via GPS, are an increasingly popular phenomenon. However, current implementations treat maps, and particularly 3D models, in fundamentally different modalities than photographs. The result is that photos tend to hover like playing cards, seemingly suspended over the world, remaining 2D objects in a 3D environment, and negating the transformative experience that we think should occur when combining images and a 3D world.
We can do better. We believe we can craft an experience that is as visceral as Google Earth and as accessible as Flickr by integrating photos into corresponding 3D models (such as Google Earth) so that they appear as perfectly aligned overlays; this could be called “situated,” “dimensionalized” or “seamless” alignment. Using appropriate interactive methods that combine human and machine intelligence, we believe that it will be possible to open up the process to geo-locate any and all photos that correspond to real-world places.
Link to Viewfinder,
Link to New York Times article on Viewfinder
