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3D Virtual Reconstructions From Microsoft
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."
If this software is half as good as the famous: "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.", then we at least should be able to use it to create Escher like visual paradoxes, but if anyone is hoping to seriously convert a few pictures of themselves into 3d models, they may find themselves in a Dali like nightmare.
You can't handle the truth.
This basically looks like Google Earth based on user photos and not satellite photos. I find it quite interesting, but a little too much of a gimmick right now. Pixel zooming into a picture is NOT the same as diving into the scene and looking around like its a virtual world.
http://religiousfreaks.com/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.
What about cars and people that change from picture to picture? It's not possible to match them. Does their reconstruction algorithm try to erase them, or to merge them?
What happens if you throw some Escher drawings at it?
This guy's the limit!
Deckard: Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Looks like panarama software on crack. Lots of legal implications I would think - depending on how the photo's are shared or linked - since it is taking photo's that you may or may not have shot and combining them all together - the question might be "who owns the final composite?".
Looks amazing though - can't wait to see it come out.
www.wildpad.com
Yes, there is this software: http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift /
It is GPL'ed but the problem is that it is using a patented algorithm (SIFT features) so it is not free to use in commercial applications without paying I guess.
pooyak.com
Upload Natalie Portman.
Then fly over her 3D body in realtime. Excellent!
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
A formerly despised and hated company actually ends up doing new neat stuff, whilst a new protaganist takes over, formerly loved as an underdog, treats everyone like crap and becomes hated.
REAL VIZ has been doing this stuff for years. They even have a few movies under their belt where their software has been used. http://www.realviz.com/
I use Hugin Panorama Tools. I think it works really well, though I don't have a lot of experience with other stitchers. It can do panorama stitching, and also correct for barrel distortion and such.
Their website shows wikipedia, not MSN Encarta :)
From what little I can make of everything I read, LiveLabs is more of a think tank that is funded by Microsoft. I don't believe they are even under much if any creative control by MS. I would think of this more like a small startup with an idea and an enormous budget... memories of the dotcom era.
So because of this affiliation, MS comes out looking innovative and creative when it's merely a small team of appearently very creative developers who have probably never touched any code of any of MS's major income generators (Office, Windows, etc).
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Wake me up when it's over.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I know you asked about an Open source stitcher, but there's also Autostitch to have a look at. It's Windows-only, but from what I can tell, their demo version has no time limit, and it does an impressive job with braindead simplicity : select pictures, click go.
OK, I won't be surprised.
I also won't be surprised when slashdotters gush and fawn over Google's product, then go ape-shit over Microsoft "tying" a software product to Windows Live Local.
There was a long discussion of pano tools, both free and commercial, over at dpchallenge.com a while back. That link is to the first page where the discussion starts, way down at the bottom. From that thread, it would appear that, while a major PITA to install and learn to use, Hugin produces results that are typically at least as good as most of the major commercial tools and are far better than many of them.
I can see where this would be a big help in investigations, journalistic, scientific, criminal, etc. Reconstructing a 3-D scene would help understand where people and things were when something happened.
Today there are mic's placed in some high crime areas that identify a gunshot and where it happened. Cameras placed at strategic locations would complete the "picture".
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?
I'm rather curious to see how well their approach scales. For example, what if you just dumped all the 1,853 photos of Times Square from Flickr into their interface? Scaling even more, in the future could one use this to aggregate all the photos in a particular city, or even have a Google Earth-like interface aggregating photos from all over the globe and integrating it with satellite data? There's some interesting computational problems with arise in trying to find correspondence between that many visual features.
I'm also like to see if they can deal with pictures taken at different times of day. I'm guessing it's still too difficult to actually adapt a day image to a night image, so it'd probably just end up treating photos taken at different times of day as different scenes.
Their video is also MUCH better. Much more impressive, they show some very cool features Microsoft did not. Still, both videos only show the User Interface. Not the calculation of the dataset. It is however no secret that Microsoft PhotoSynth is basically this with a different UI. Or maybe completely the same. (Notice that the Microsoft name is both present on the PhotoTour homepage and the paper for SigGRAPH).
Do also read the SigGRAPH paper. This is the actually tech part. http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/Photo_Tourism.
Some interesting facts you'll find there:
- They used a 3.4 GHz computer.
- The Notre Dame example took two weeks to compute.
- only 597 of the 2635 images were used, the rest was discarded.
This definitely isn't of much use to "home" users. You'll need a semi-professional photographer to cover the whole location. If there are some bigger holes in the imagery, you'll probably not get a useful result. If the images don't overlap, how is the software supposed to calculate their relative position?Debian GNU/Linux - apt-get into it.