Nice to see Microsoft doing something truly groundbreaking, or at least acquiring something truly groundbreaking. The above demo of Photosynth and Seadragon by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (now that’s a name) is remarkable for both it’s smart computation and sewing together of images to create a navigable space, that is relatively resolution independent (in terms of processing speed at least) but also for its potential interface ramifications. I’m starting to see how something like that connected to Surface would be pretty nice to have around. Remarkably there is a demo available to try (for those of you with XP SP2 and Vista).
But it’s also a great example of how tiny contributions to the group pool add up to far more than the sum of the parts. As Blaise says, once someone tags your images with extra metadata, they become instantly more rich and useful. Words are relatively useless here, take a look at the video above or the video on the Live Labs site.