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Microsoft Research and University of Washington have worked out a technique to transform many photos of a place into a 3D scene of the place that could be explored and toured virtually.

According to the research pages at the University of Washington:

When a scene is photographed many times by different people, the viewpoints often cluster along certain paths. These paths are largely specific to the scene being photographed, and traverse interesting regions and viewpoints. We seek to discover a range of such paths and turn them into controls for image-based rendering. Our approach takes as input a large set of community or personal photos, reconstructs camera viewpoints, and automatically computes orbits, panoramas, canonical views, and optimal paths between views. The scene can then be interactively browsed in 3D using these controls or with five degree-of-freedom free-viewpoint control. As the user browses the scene, nearby views are continuously selected and transformed, using control-adaptive reprojection techniques.

You can visit the Bundler web pages to download code and binaries of this technique.

Embedded below is the research paper outlining this technique.

Finding Paths Through the World’s Photos - Get more Information Technology

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