So how many of you upload vacation photos to flickr.  Well keep doing it because programmers have found an interesting way to turn your travel pictures into an awesome sight for the rest of us.  They use our photos to render 3D models of tourist destinations.  The video shows the mapping of Dubrovnik, Croatia.  It's special because it maps an entire city and not just a landmark.  This isn't the first incarnation of mass photo computation.  There is another program out there that is called photosynth, and it's the one that focuses on landmarks.

A group of researchers with University of Washington's graphics and imaging laboratory (GRAIL) wanted to see if they could build a piece of software that would search the web for images of a particular place and recreate that place in 3D in under a day. They succeeded. Rome was their first target, since it is such a well-photographed city. Their software harvested images from photo-sharing site Flickr, and recreated landmarks from around the city by determining the angles at which each photograph had been shot and arranging the images accordingly.

 Via io9 , techeblog  & Gizmodo