  Intensity interferometry removes the stringent requirements on mechanical
precision and atmospheric corrections that plague all amplitude interferometry
techniques at the cost of severely limited sensitivity. A new idea we recently
introduced, very high redundancy, alleviates this problem. It enables the
relatively simple construction (~1cm mechanical precision) of a ground-based
astronomical facility able to transform a two-dimensional field of point-like
sources to a three-dimensional distribution of micro-arcsec resolved systems,
each imaged in several optical bands. Each system will also have its high
resolution residual timing, high quality (inside each band) spectra and light
curve, emergent flux, effective temperature, polarization effects and perhaps
some thermodynamic properties, all directly measured. All the above attributes
can be measured in a single observation run of such a dedicated facility. We
conclude that after three decades of abandonment optical intensity
interferometry deserves another review, also as a ground-based alternative to
the science goals of space interferometers.
