Using Google Earth to organize and understand Flickr photos
USC’s Interactive Media Division and the Institute for Creative Technologies have created Viewfinder, a program they describe as allowing users to “Flickrize” Google Earth. As described on the website, the project aims to “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.”
You can view a movie of Viewfinder to see what it can do.
Viewfinder is reminiscent of Microsoft Live Labs’ Photosynth. But Photosynth relies on personal collections of photos, from what I can tell.
Using Flickr for source photos in Viewfinder adds a lot of power to the Viewfinder application. Flickr, as a collection, represents a huge amount of data and understanding of our (collective) surroundings. Flickr is fascinating now, and will be much more so in another 10 years, another 30 years. Adding Google Earth as a layer behind the Flickr collection extends our capacity to interact with and understand photos in Flickr.
