Here are a couple of interesting things coming out of MS:
Photosynthe – pretty cool. Creates a point cloud in 3D of a group of photos. No human intervention required. It looks at your photos and puts them together – in panormas. It figures out details. Lets you zoom in. It is pretty cool. All this is done in a web browser. Offline the server analyzes photos, matches them up, lets you zoom in, move around. It figures out camera angles and puts in triangles that show where the photographer was standing when they took the picture. The image processing is amazing.
Virtual Earth 3D – 3d version of maps like google earth.