Mars-o-vision

February 24, 2004 2:15 AM

Mars 3D, without the red & green glasses. The work is being carried out by Antonio Criminisi and Andrew Blake from Microsoft's research labs in Cambridge. The pair have developed algorithms that can take a single flat image or painting and turn it into an virtual environment.
posted by MintSauce (11 comments total)

(The examples in the last link are well worth a look too)
posted by MintSauce at 2:16 AM on February 24, 2004

I must be blind to this, because I really don't see anything 3D about the mars photos at all.
posted by moonbiter at 2:32 AM on February 24, 2004

how did they land on mars when they havent even landed on the moon yet?

THE FLAG WAS WAVING, HELLO.
posted by Satapher at 2:55 AM on February 24, 2004

Didn't Kai Krause's (of Bryce fame etc.) company already do this?

OK you had to "paint" objects, as in, "this is a wall, at this angle", and the software just took the texture of that portion of the image and pasted it onto the object
posted by slater at 3:05 AM on February 24, 2004

I must be blind to this, because I really don't see anything 3D about the mars photos at all.

It's the movies that have a 3D effect. Quite cool.
posted by swordfishtrombones at 4:17 AM on February 24, 2004

Did anyone else see Sasquatch hiding behind a rock in that first one?
posted by Outlawyr at 5:46 AM on February 24, 2004

Metacreations, before it was bought up and chopped into very tiny parts, used to have a kick-ass program that could model 3D environments based on 2D photographs. The program was called canoma.

This was a couple of years ago... I don't know if anyone took up the flame after they disappeared, or if this idea has simply been languishing inside the laboratories of Microsoft mad scientists.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:00 AM on February 24, 2004

Photomodeler will assist the user in creating 3D objects out of photographs . The developers have pulled the old freeware lite (but powerfull) version, but it can still be found via google ;-)

There are plenty of commercial apps that will do it too ...
posted by magullo at 6:44 AM on February 24, 2004

Argh. I wish they'd provide MPGs for everything, because WMV isn't working for me. The one MPG that they do have is excellent, though it I don't think it was created from just a single image: it gets its angles from the stereo images used for the anaglyph.

Reminds me of the Time for Space Wiggle. After I saw it done so effectively on the Pathfinder/Sojourner mission by our own kokogiak, I decided to do some of my own Mars wiggles. Now I'm hooked. I can't stop wiggling.
posted by brownpau at 6:59 AM on February 24, 2004

I've seen rock climbing photographs that do this.

Microsoft calls this research?
posted by the fire you left me at 8:27 AM on February 24, 2004

I too had problems with the WMVs loading automatically (Mozilla & IE on Win2K) but clicking on the links directly worked on both browsers.

Wiggly goodness, reminded me a bit of bullet-time.

Neat, but better would be a kind of slider that would allow you to push the image around to do the lookin' yourself.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 8:55 AM on February 24, 2004