At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel CEO Paul Otellini demoed how the company's processors are being used to render a 3D model from millions of user-generated images taken from photo-sharing sites such as Flicker and Picasa. We like the view that this could lead to crowd sourced 3D modelling, indeed it seems to be the current trend:
The work is being done at the University of Washington, where researchers have crowd-sourced images from the Web and created 3D re-construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.