I am an engineer, and most of the work I do is retrofitting new stuff to old sites. I usually go out and take a bunch of pictures, so when we’re back in the office talking about the job, we can refer to exactly what’s on site. However, unless you’ve been to site yourself, the photos are just a big jumble of disconnected images. It’s also impossible to extract distances or geometries from the photos. If we need to build a 3D model for new construction — which happens quite frequently — then that represents hours of measuring and CAD drafting.

So I’m in complete agreement that Photosynth is focusing on the wrong result!

It would be incredibly powerful to be able to build a 3D model just by taking a bunch of photos. Building a full color solid model isn’t even necessary (although it would be very cool); even just a point cloud of sorts that could be tweaked by a user to map out features and measure distances, that would be such a killer app for the type of work I do.