We present a system for exploring large collections of
photos in a virtual 3D space. Our system does not assume
the photographs are of a single real 3D location, nor that
they were taken at the same time. Instead, we organize the
photos in themes, such as city streets or skylines, and let
users navigate within each theme using intuitive 3D controls
that include move left/right, zoom and rotate. Themes allow
us to maintain a coherent semantic meaning of the tour,
while visual similarity allows us to create a ”being there”
impression, as if the images were of a particular location.
We present results on a collection of several million images
downloaded from Flickr and broken into themes that consist
of a few hundred thousand images each. A byproduct of our
system is the ability to construct extremely long panoramas,
as well as image taxi, a program that generates a virtual
tour between a user supplied start and finish images. The
system, and its underlying technology can be used in a variety
of applications such as games, movies and online virtual
3D spaces like Second Life.