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3D Virtual Reconstructions From Microsoft

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the all-manner-of-shiny dept.

Lord Satri writes "New around the corner, Microsoft Live Labs' Photosynth, will 'take a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.' There's a demonstrational video and a 'smart photos' example page. From the site Very Spatial: 'The word is that Photosynth will be available for free, at least at first, but no word yet on an exact release date.' I must admit, seems like Photosynth may offer interesting features with an clean interface. This tool will directly compete with Stitcher, and to some extent, Google SketchUp. The virtual world reconstruction tools market is getting crowded, and competition is good. Microsoft doesn't yet have software to tie a photo library with Windows Live Local (Google does), but don't be surprised if it comes to life."

3 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Real Estate by brunes69 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This software could revolutionize buying real estate remotely. Imagine, an agent goes in with a cheap digicam and takes a bunch of shots of the house they're selling. They load them into this software which creates a 3D, navigable model of the house, which someone can browse via a browser plugin.

    Sure, this has been around for a while with VRML, but it was complicated and costly for an agent to do. From the looks of this software you can use normal photos as a base. Anyone could create 3D tours with this.

  2. Wikipedia, not MSN Encarta by danielsanII · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Their website shows wikipedia, not MSN Encarta :)

  3. The next step - video by Chairboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The next logical step (as the algorithms improve, hardware gets faster, and demand grows) will be to do the same with video. See http://www.bigfootencounters.com/files/mk_davis_pg f.gif to see a cursory example of how motion picture data can be used to build a persistent environment.

    Another poster earlier in the thread speculated that a real estate agent could photo a house to make a virtual tour. Even better, maybe, would be to just carry a high def video camera of some sort through the house, waving it around to get at least a little bit of footage of everything. With that data, an intelligent program could composite a 3D representation with even fewer blackout spots. Combine this with an accelerometer/gyro field that gives a non-software correlation to the video stream, and it's essentially bulletproof.

    In the form demonstrated, this is a fantastic heavy duty software solution, but physical tracking data would both make this job easier and improve the quality.

    I suspect that in the near future we will see the following technologies made ubiquitous in cameras:
    1. GPS
    2. Tilt/Compass
    3. Accelerometer/motion tracking for video.

    Items 1 and 2 would enable any camera to provide very accurate geo-located data. #3 with video gives you tracking where GPS fails plus the super accurate tracking data needed to take this to the next level.

    "But Chairboy, you tool, why would the camera companies go to the expense?"

    The features listed have become incredibly cheap (both in cost and power consumption) over the past few years. Within a couple years, it'll probably be hard to NOT have them in one of the shared chipsets the camera manufacturers use, and at that point, why fight it?