Crowd-Sourced Virtual Reality

Last Month when I was in New York, my wife Andrea and I took a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. I had my Canon Rebel xti and was snapping a bunch of photographs. About halfway through the walk, I realized just how many cameras were on the bridge at that time. Everyone had a camera, and everyone was taking photos. It got me thinking.

Wouldn’t it be cool if two things were to happen …

1. All cameras had a gps and a compass installed, just like your iPhone.
2. Sites that people upload photos to, such as Facebook and Flickr captured this data and utilized it in a smart way, with other data, like type of camera, lens, etc

If you stitched those two things together, you know these things:

• Where someone is
• What direction they’re facing
• The type of camera + lens they’re using (already included with Flickr meta)

You could build a crowd sourced, almost real time (if the photos were uploaded immediately), virtual reality video/time lapse video. For big tourist destinations, this could be amazing. For Sporting events, you could see a 360 view of the field. Big shared experiences could almost be recreated. What if you were then able to add location specific tweets into the mix.

Very much like GigaPan or Microsoft Photosynth, but entirely sourced from lots of different people and made into a virtual reality video.

… and ya, there are probably some privacy issues there.

Technology excites me.