Computer scientists at the University of Washington and Microsoft are developing software for organizing digital photos. OK, nothing new. But overall, it can compile images from common scenes to create 3D virtual environments.

Photo Tourism could be used for creating virtual tours, recreating events or even developing a map from all the photos from the Internet.

"You might look at a photo and say I wonder what's just to the left of it, or I wonder what's just to the right of it, or I wish I could expand the field of view," says Noah Snavely, explaining the frustration when searching photo on classical tools as Flickr.

Photo Tourism examines details shared by images and can tell if they're representing the same scene. If yes, it fuses them together in a 3D model. For a better description of the software, please see the video and for a trial, there is a java applet here (chose live demo).