I’m sitting in a pretty sizable mall (Natick Mall in MA near Boston) and thinking about how a mirror-world local search would work. In other words, think about how a use can browse to the Natick Mall, walk around this space immersively, walk into stores, and shop like in real life?  How would EveryScape implement this?  How would Bing or Google do this?

Natick Mall Partial Panorama

I snapped a few photos and created a partial panorama above within a few minutes using my iPhone 4 and AutoStitch.  You can see more than a dozen shops from a simple image like this, and it can give you a pretty good insight into what the space is like.

How can I get the “crowd” to do this for me?  Will Foursquare/Gowalla-like approach work?  How well is the photo-crowd sourcing working?  How do we solve the GPS problem for indoors?