Marc Adler posts about how he sees the work Microsoft is doing with Sea Dragon as the next generation of heatmaps. I'm not sure I see a direct connection, but I can see how this could have the same depth of impact on UIs as heatmaps do.

I have played around a little with PhotoSynth, and while I was fascinated and spent several hours I didn't have exploring some of the photosets, I didn't make a connection to anything I do.

What did cause me to make a connection was the possibility of an infinitely zoomable UI. The TED video Marc linked to shows some examples of zooming into an ad in a newspaper, seeing some fine print with additional information, zooming into that, seeing more fine print, zooming, etc. I thought that was really amazing.

There are a lot of UI metaphors common in software that kind of all dance around the restriction that you can't zoom. Instead of Two-Panel Selector (what I always refer to as "Master Detail"), for example, you could have Zoom Drill-Down. Instead of tabs for different categories of information, how about boxes that you zoom into to see details.

I can't wait to move to a UI technology that enables this sort of UI metaphor. I want to play around with building zoomable interfaces.