Navigating the Worldwide Community of Photos

The last decade has seen an explosion in the number of photographs available on the Internet. The sheer volume of interesting photos makes it a challenge to explore this space. VariousWeb and social media sites, along with search and indexing techniques, have been developed in response. One natural way to navigate these images in a 3D geo-located context. In this article, we reflect on our work in this area, with a focus on techniques that build partial 3D scene models to help find and navigate interesting photographs in an interactive, immersive 3D setting. We also discuss how finding such relationships among photographs opens up exciting new possibilities for multimedia authoring, visualization, and editing.