Slashdot Mirror
Rome, Built In a Day
spmallick writes "Researchers at the University of Washington, in collaboration with Microsoft, have recreated the city of Rome in 3D using images obtained from Flickr. The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated with the tags 'Rome' or 'Roma,' and it took 21 hours on 496 compute cores to create a 3D digital model. Unlike Photosynth / Photo Tourism, the goal was to reconstruct an entire city and not just individual landmarks. Previous versions of the Photo Tourism software matched each photo to every other photo in the set. But as the number of photos increases the number of matches explodes, increasing with the square of the number of photos. A set of 250,000 images would take at least a year for 500 computers to process... A million photos would take more than a decade! The newly developed code works more than a hundred times faster than the previous version. It first establishes likely matches and then concentrates on those parts."
Hell yeah! I come to Slashdot for the slightly outdated stories, stay to read the comments of disillusion Linux fanboys.
The research team also announced their next project: Natalie Portman 3D based on the actress of the same name. The team is asking geeks everywhere for their assistance in providing pictures of her, and of course, grits.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It would have been even faster if they'd have started with the edges and leaved the sky for the end like in any other puzzle.
....but it would have been if the first coat had dried.
My web domain.
Aren't humans just awesome?
We build amazing structures that last over a thousand years of constant wear and we invent photography to capture the awe inspiring moments that such marvelous creations cast upon ourselves, then create computers to recreate their 3D Dimensions almost perfectly in a virtual environment using nothing but our pictures that we've taken and our impressive ingenuity.
If you can read this: Pat yourself on the back.
Well, now that Microsoft has done somebody will try to copy them by driving around Rome in a car that takes pictures of everything around it. Oh wait, http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&g=colosseo,+roma&ie=UTF8&layer=c&cbll=41.891293,12.49059&panoid=haogKvGCLWGZlNYPmGLLPA&cbp=11,130.48,,0,-7.13&ll=41.891294,12.490585&spn=0.002588,0.009645&t=h&z=17
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
Can this be used for Pr0n?