Comments on: Another step into the metaverse

Another step into the metaverse

mullingitover — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:42:05 -0800

Building on the ideas of Microsoft's Photosynth, flickr's geotagging, and Google's Panoramio, Viewfinder aims to organize photographs spatially in 3D worlds such as Google Earth. See it in action.

By: nilihm

nilihm — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:58:54 -0800

It's always nice to find an easy, user-powered solution to complex computational problems like this one. Imagine seeding photogrammetry software, like Photosynth, with an image aligned using USC's Viewfinder or a similar program. Geotagged photos could daisy chain off this one, building a network of overlapping photos aligned in three-space. Now, we have more to work with than location. A slider could control the date of images in the layer, allowing you to witness the typical lunch hour, a winter snow, or urban development through decades of images. This isn't far away. In fact, Microsoft's own World Wide Telescope offers similar functionality for wavelength. All I'm sayin' is, we're in for a ride.

By: rokusan

rokusan — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:15:15 -0800

I won't believe this is "easy and user-powered" until I see a decent 3d-navigation interface that someone other than a 3d artist or programmer can use. Can we adopt, like, Halo controls and a gamepad as standard PC peripherals? That would work. Everything that uses a mouse and/or keys is user hostile.... and I've done more than a few focus groups on it.

By: amuseDetachment

amuseDetachment — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:24:59 -0800

If you want to read more about the tech behind Photosynth, the research was done at Photo Tourism at UW, with links to the research papers and the people involved. Live demo here.

By: DU

DU — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:01:27 -0800

Everything that uses a mouse and/or keys is user hostile.... and I've done more than a few focus groups on it. I'm having a hard time imagining a user so out-to-lunch that Google Earth's interface wouldn't be pretty simple to use. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable.

By: phrontist

phrontist — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:04:30 -0800

rokusan: Space Ball!

By: blacklite

blacklite — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:54:35 -0800

Everything that uses a mouse and/or keys is user hostile. You're not big on those computer things, eh?

By: jfrancis

jfrancis — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:57:10 -0800

camera projection

By: jfrancis

jfrancis — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:58:29 -0800

Stitching images in 3-space

By: jfrancis

jfrancis — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:00:06 -0800

automatic panoramic image merging