If you recall, Photosynth is a Microsoft Research project that used thousands of photos to construct 3D views of locations. Researchers at the University of Washington have scale it up. A lot.

There is an awesome convergence of photogrammetric techniques — like this as well as Microsoft’s Virtual Earth — and human edited geometry a la Second Life and Google Earth coming that is going to give us interactive-scale and fully up-to-date models of the whole world.

And wait for that convergence to hit augmented reality. Living in the future kicks butt.