This would be pretty cool, which is good since we’re headed in this direc­tion already.

Take this story: Entire Cities Recre­ated Using Thou­sands of Flickr Photos

“A group of researchers with Uni­ver­sity of Washington’s graph­ics and imag­ing lab­o­ra­tory (GRAIL) wanted to see if they could build a piece of soft­ware that would search the web for images of a par­tic­u­lar place and recre­ate that place in 3D in under a day.

They suc­ceeded, and the team, lead by Sameer Agar­wal, cre­ated a sim­u­la­tion of Rome using 150,000 images har­vested from photo-sharing web­site Flickr, and build a vir­tual model within a day.

The team also tested the soft­ware on the Croa­t­ian city of Dubrovnic and were able to recre­ate the entire old city, includ­ing all the build­ings and streets, within 22 hours.”>

Mix in local, dig­i­tized his­tory from the library and archives, the way DOK does with their Sur­face table app that reads your library card and retrieves his­tor­i­cal images of your neighborhood.

Mul­ti­touch Microsoft Sur­face: Cul­tural Her­itage Browser from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

Top off with the com­ing wave of aug­mented real­ity apps for mobile devices, led by the “it’s already here” Yelp app for local reviews.

“Yelp’s new iPhone app is now the first iPhone App with Aug­mented Real­ity. It takes Yelp infor­ma­tion and over­lays it into the real-world. It’s actu­ally a secret easter egg (dis­cov­ered by Robert Scoble), which may be why Apple didn’t reject Yelp’s aug­mented real­ity app. We have screen­shots and a demo video to show you what this is all about.” [Mash­able]

And you get a glimpse of where vir­tual worlds, ubiq­ui­tous infor­ma­tion, and mobile broad­band access will con­verge. I can imag­ine walk­ing through Chicago neigh­bor­hoods (like Pull­man), around the Mall in Wash­ing­ton DC, and other places where libraries can add value to this type of experience.

If you feel infor­ma­tion over­load now, just wait until that infor­ma­tion flow mag­i­cally appears all around you in the real world and not just on a screen. Can librar­i­ans become part of users’ net­works and help fil­ter out some of the noise? Will libraries make their archives open and avail­able for these types of uses?

Tags: augmented reality, digital archives, DOK, mobile devices, virtual worlds