19May/080
Seadragon and Photosynth
I saw this demo video posted on Digg: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/637132/this_technology_will_blow_your_mind/
The second half of the video struck me as novel. Image based reconstruction of 3D environments is nothing new. Doing it using images mined from Flickr or other large databases is as far as I know.
I Googled for the project home page for Photosynth, intending to play with their demo, but didn't bother when I saw it was Windows only.