PhotoSketch takes a stick-figure drawing and automatically generates a photo-realistic rendition from images pulled from the Internet. Basically you draw some stick-figures, and add some descriptive labels. The software then scans the web for images matching the descriptive labels, and the basic shapes represented by the stick figures. It creates sets of images that it thinks will merge best into a cohesive whole, and then merges and generates the final images from the composites.
The results are not perfect, and perspective often seems a little off, but the images are remarkably good, and beautifully blended.
PhotoSketch was created by Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore in China, and will be demoed in December at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.