Microsoft Photosynth - photo organization for the 21st century?
One really major challenge for technology in the coming years is finding stuff. I've taken around 20 000 images with our digicam, but they're not much to have if you can't find the images you want. I've long felt that AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the way to go, because it's much to tedious to tag images manually.
The Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth project may well be a good approximation of searching in the future. From the site: Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
Basically you take a bunch of images from the same location, and it's turned into something intuitively three-dimensional. Check out this Photosynth demonstation video, it's so worth it.
Post Scriptum
I'm usually pretty critical of Microsoft, and I sure won't say what I think about their pricing of Vista retail, but this looks like a very interesting project. One can only hope this idea won't get to generally patented preventing others from creating similar technology.