The first is to push the camera and lens to the limit. The Gigapxl project shows what can be done with a lens and camera. They are currently taking 4 gigapixel pictures and pushing for more. To put that in perspective, in a photo of a football field, a blade of grass would be about 100 pixels wide. You can see examples of extreme zooming that makes possible here.
The Photosynth project demonstrates the stitching together of many images into a very large composite image. This video demonstrates the ways such image collections can be viewed.
This project is interesting in at least two ways. For one, it shows how we may one day navigate and zoom around on a large document like a newspaper page. This user interface may end up replacing scroll bars and zoom buttons.
Second, it demonstrates collaborative image making, since the photos may be taken by many people. As the video shows, a composite image of the Notre Dame Cathedral can be constructed using photos taken by tourists and posted on Flickr.
Are you suprised that there were enough photos of the Cathedral on Flickr to make the composit image? It turns out that Flickr has over one billion pictures (October 2007) . If a small percentage have tags like Notre Dame Cathedral or have the Cathedral's geocode, there will be many relevant images.
Many advances in computing and networking technology begin, like these, as demonstrations of prototypes. There is a saying in the computer science research community -- "demo or die."
The mother of all demos was Doug Engelbart's 1968 demonstration of the systems he and his colleagues had been building over a period of 7 years at the Stanford Research Institute. The demonstration was done via a remote hookup between Engelbart's lab in Palo Alto and a computer science conference in San Francisco.
This was the first public demonstration of shared documents and data, word processing where the document on the screen looked like the final printed document, outline processing, breaking a computer screen into windows, using a mouse to point and select, hyperlinks, mixing of images and text in documents, keyword search, messaging within the group, etc.
This was the "Wright Brother's flight" of computer science demonstrations. In many ways, today's networked computers and applications are improved versions of the prototype Engelbart demonstrated.
Note that Engelbart's work was sponsored by the US Government. It was one of a small number of projects that received generous funding and time to develop the underpinnings of today's personal computers and networks.
Today research is more likely to be sponsored by corporations. Adobe and Leica support the Gigapxl project and Microsoft and the University of Washington support Photosynth.