There is this really cool technology from Microsoft Live Labs called Photsynth. What it does is take a collection of photographs and build it into this VRML type 3D enviornment for navigating and viewing photos. While not necessarily creating a 3D model to walk through, it’s sort of a simulation of positions of objects in the photographs. It even appears to find common objects across photos and remove the redundancy.
There is a pretty cool demo video here.
With Photosynth you can:
* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
* Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
* Explore a custom tour.
* Send a collection to a friend.
I REALLY need to get a blog man. I found the video on this yesterday as well.
I REALLY enjoyed the notion the man brought up on the video about Photosynth on a global scale. He suggested people stitch photos globally with others, so if you had a picture of a place, and couldn’t remember where it was, when the engine recognized it as mappable to another person’s collection, you could see the world built around it.