Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
Upload Natalie Portman.
Then fly over her 3D body in realtime. Excellent!
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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 :)
This isn't really pixel zooming, it "zooms" by determining which of the pictures of the scene it has is closest to the view selected by the user, and switching to that one, rather than zooming in on a specific image. So if you, for example, select to view the head of a statue from a picture of that statue, it looks for a picture of the head of statue, then views that. It's pretty neat.
Wake me up when it's over.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Man-made objects should be pretty easy for software to put together. We tend to build things in a non-random fashion. I'd be a lot more interested to see how well this software works with natural objects like trees (blowing in the wind, no less) than it works with buildings.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
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.
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?