‘Deja vu,’ I’ve seen this before

Posted on June 15, 2007 by Melissa Worden

In the film Deja Vu with Denzel Washington, the government found a way to use many different satellite video images to pull together a 3-D image that took place exactly four days in the past.

One of those movies that requires you to ’suspend reality’ for a few hours, right?

Well, maybe not. Blaise Aguera y Arcas has co-created an application called Photosynth, which grafts together a variety of images into a multidimensional space that can be viewed from different angles and magnifications (minus the time travel portal … for now).

Search for commonly shot things such as Notre Dame, and the application builds it for you based on all the photos found on the Web.

Says Arcas:

“We can do things with the social environment; this is now taking data from everybody from the entire collective data, link them together and create something emergent that’s greater than the sum of its parts.”

Check out this video demo at TED and this one via Microsoft Live Labs to see it for yourself.

So you’ve seen how cool it is for photos. Do the same thing with video, and we’ve just made a seemingly far-fetched sci-fi movie a reality.

(TED link found via MultimediaShooter)