Another step into the metaverse
April 9, 2008 3:42 PM   Subscribe

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.
posted by mullingitover (9 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
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.
posted by nilihm at 4:58 PM on April 9, 2008


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.
posted by rokusan at 5:15 PM on April 9, 2008


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.
posted by amuseDetachment at 5:24 PM on April 9, 2008


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.
posted by DU at 6:01 PM on April 9, 2008


rokusan: Space Ball!
posted by phrontist at 6:04 PM on April 9, 2008


Everything that uses a mouse and/or keys is user hostile.

You're not big on those computer things, eh?
posted by blacklite at 6:54 PM on April 9, 2008 [1 favorite]


camera projection
posted by jfrancis at 6:57 PM on April 9, 2008 [1 favorite]


Stitching images in 3-space
posted by jfrancis at 6:58 PM on April 9, 2008 [1 favorite]




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