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."
As far as I can tell, after skimming TFA and watching the little demo video, they weren't actually copying the pictures, but using them to build a 3D model.
It would be kind of like aggregating a bunch of books in the library to come up with a letter distribution chart. You're not violating the copyrights of the authors, just compiling information from raw data.
I'm certain the faculty at UW are completely familiar enough with free software that they could have made this work without MS's help.
150,000 photos. 21 Hours. 496 Cores. That makes it a labor intensive, computation intensive project. None of that comes "free as in beer."
Hell yeah! I come to Slashdot for the slightly outdated stories, stay to read the comments of disillusion Linux fanboys.
Photosynth was showcased in a mid 2007 TED talk. You can find it here.
It would be nice to have photosynths of monuments, art, or architecture that have been damaged or destroyed (e.g. the Buddhas dynamited in Afghanistan, the churches that collapsed in the 2009 Italy earthquake) from tourist photos that may be floating out in the interwebs.
The teams actual site has more pics and videos, including St. Peter's Basilica, Trevi Fountain, and info on Venice.
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/
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.
Imagine if the God of War team could instantly recreate entire cities like this. Or the Fallout 3 team could snap a few thousand photos of Las Vegas and then digitize an entire city within a day and then work out the kinks. Or the Grand Theft Auto developers could recreate New Yo...ahem, Liberty City and then build a perfect 3D model and just slap textures on the buildings.
Sure it's not a perfect system but this has so much potential to help recreate cities or terrain within video games.
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.
It is nice to see that they have optimized the algorithm, but what about the presentation? It looks like it is still just a point cloud, just as it was two years ago. Why isn't it a fully textured 3d model? It shouldn't be that hard to do that when you already have the points in 3d.