A while back, I had written about photosynth, when it just came out. Created by Microsoft, the idea is to stitch together multiple images taken by complete strangers to create a panoramic view taken from multiple vantage point. Well, Google just issued their version thought the Spanish company Panoramio. Panoramio is the company that allows you to post your images on Google Earth.
With its content, Panoramio has created its on stitches to render a full anonymous picture of a place. Using hundred of images taken by various people at different time, one can visualized a place or a monument thought a series a similar images. One image leads to another one and so on. Maybe the idea is to put together photographs of the whole world so that one could literally see every place. Google certainly has the means and the ambition. It would be a sort of social map constituted of all the images of the earth as seen by everyone.
You can see an example here
This technology, along with others of the kind, shows how terribly unique the internet is when it deals with photographs . The possibilities to create and expand are almost endless, while giving the user a richer experience.
This would be hard to be used in sport, however, but just think if you could stitch together thousands of images of the winning moment at the 100 meter final at the Olympics. A thousand views for one moment.
This technology could also be applied to commercial stock, making the image more 3D and interactive. Or in news, breaking the usual slide show linear model of one image after the other but all in one. Think of the New York Times readers gallery of photographs on the crane incident. This, to me, illustrate the “Future of Contemporary Photography” much more than any images of eggs, empty parking lots or thousand of sunsets ripped from their online presence to be pasted on a lonely, endless wall.