As they state in the abstract the real-time rendering of arbitrarily large textures is a problem that has long been studied in terrain visualization. For years, different approaches have been published that have either expensive hardware requirements or other severe limitations in quality, performance or versatility. The biggest problem is usually a strong coupling between geometry and texture, both regarding database structure, as well as LOD management.
Their work paper presents a new approach to high resolution, real-time texturing of dynamic data that avoids the drawbacks of previous techniques and offers additional possibilities - take a look at the movie below detailing a 8 gigapixel images projected onto a virtual globe and updated every second:
The paper 'Dynamic Virtual Textures' (PDF link) is published in the Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision '2009 (WSCG 2009) in co-operation with EUROGRAPHICS.
