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Google Earth is a perfectly adequate route / coverage planning tool, if you are worried about accuracy to the foot, you can start with Google Earth and make your own high-res geo-tiff of the area.

I think crop-dusting by drone is already done in Europe, and swarms of small/cheap drones are better than hauling 200lbs of flesh and bone through the air any day.

3D Porn! Need I say more? Anyway now that I got your attention I remember sketching a camera like this 15 years ago and learning *then* that it was nothing new... I heard that Disney's panoramic movie at Disneyland LA used something like this, just in analog and without the processing. True 3d processing is like what you see at http://2d3.com/ ...

If you are given a video stream from a security camera and the subject is moving slowly relative to the frame (e.g. license plate of a car taxiing towards a gate), you may have a chance to recover more spatial resolution using temporal information. The idea is that each pixel in the camera will "scan" slightly different parts of the subject in different frames, like how a flatbed scanner works. If you can accurately track the subject in different frames, then you can stitch together a scan of the interesting pixels to uncover subtle detail. Here is a commercial product that implements this feature.

That company seems to be doing some amazing things in the area of computer vision. Their demo movies showed some scenes from tv and movies that I had seen, and wondered how they were done. I figured the makers of the scenes had had some way of superimposing computer graphics seamlessly over the real world images from a camera. It seems this companys software makes that possible by calculating how the camera moves through a 3d space. It seems that they even have a working realtime version for augmented reality. Truly remarkable stuff.

This is doable, if this product is for real and sells at a good price it will be great. The only software that can do this right now is very expensive camera tracking tools, like :Bijou

The tech behind this amazing stuff is from 2d3, a UK company. Among others, WETA digitals (responsible for the LOTR CG effects) used their camera-tracking soft for post-production.

Holodeck, closer than we think?

(* That was my sense on it. I think that the digital transfer must be to improve the resolution somehow....? *)

This is pure conjecture but it would appear that algorithms not too dissimilar to this could certainly be used to up-res footage - and would presumably yield better results than just spatial interpolation. In the link objects are removed from footage by making use of temporal information - but it seems fairly obvious how this could be used to increase resolution (to me anyway - maybe I'm wrong).

AC (no, really...)

An english company, 2d3 were demoing something pretty similar to that at SIGGRAPH this year.

They look to have some pretty cool stuff in the pipeline, aimed at post houses and the like.