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View photos of sculpture in a 3D space? Coming soon.. |
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Written by mike lyda
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Nov 10, 2006 at 12:02 PM |
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Imagine being able to look at an object or place, we'll consider Michelangelo's David for example, and imagine being able to see photos that hundreds or thousands of people have taken of David - and have them all mapped out in a 3D space that you can move around in.
Oh, shoot.. this isn't a good example. You'd end up with 500 close up photos of his big toe, right?
(try again)
The image you see here (Roger Halligan's "Trails Head Stone" at the Center for Craft Creativity and Design in Asheville, NC)  is of a 3D object, but totally misses the point of experiencing something in 3D
- you can't look at it from another angle
- you see it frozen in time and can't experience how it changes with time (the leaves around it change, it gets snow on it, etc)
Imagine being able to easily look at 100 photos that have been taken of this piece of sculpture by different people at different times of the year from different viewpoints. That would be interesting, yes?
Well, some crafty programmers have figured out how to make this possible and if you have a fairly fast PC and fast Internet connection you can see the results (for free, as in beer) now by going to the Microsoft labs site and trying the photosynth "tech preview". It only works with Internet Explorer, so if you've already made the switch to Firefox (like you should..) you'll need to dig around and find IE again.
The preview even has a 3D look into an artists studio.. but it's a painters studio (Gary Faigin).. ?? huh? Oh well. It also has several views of Piazza San Marco in Venice and Piazza San Pietro in Rome .. very cool stuff. Here's a screenshot showing what the viewer looks like..
(click to see a larger version..)
What does this mean for the future? It probably won't be too long until people will be able to upload (or use a program on their computer to process) photos that they've taken and the photos will be combined into a 3D space so people can view what was happening at a certain place. The software looks at all of the photos and finds similar lines and shapes and uses those to create the 3D space. Digital cameras already record the time and date a photo was taken if you set them and the technology is already here to record the exact location and angle that the photo was taken by using GPS. If you already know the location the photo was taken ("Times Square", "Grandma's house", etc) then the photos don't really need a GPS location stamp. So it will be possible to just drop a whole bunch of images into this system and it will find ones that were taken in the same place, create a virtual 3D space based on those photos, and present them in that space. |
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