Summary
The University of Washington and Cornell University are making a system to create 3D reproductions of buildings, streets and even cities.
Photocity is the name of the new program which is original work of a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavly. He also developed a set of algorithms that generates 3D models. The original project was Photo Tourism and was Microsoft's Photosynth service. However, Photosynth collections are limited to hundreds of photos but scientists wanted more. Their technology has to be able to handle thousands or even millions of photos.
To make the quality of their rendering capabilities better, they want to integrate their computer system into a social game (Foldit, released in May 2008). This should improve the quality of the visual models. Next to the game, the scientists also want an I phone application. Peter Lee, a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) program manager said that such a collaborative system has a great promise for using the creative abilities of people in tandem with networked computers. They also should have to mobilize a lot of people because someone will come up with a better idea and this might help to improve the system.
To find volunteers to use/ test the program, they've founded the website www.photocitygame.com . Everybody, who wants to be an administrator, can upload photos of a particular building. If you upload a photo, you help them reconstructing the world in 3D.
Comments
I think this really is a good subject for innovation because it shows again how far technology is and how quick it goes. 10 years ago people were still taking pictures with their Polaroid or with their analogue camera and were suspicious of the digital camera. Now, almost everybody has a digital camera and scientists are searching for ways to make photos 3D to create a virtual 3D world.
Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/science/23crowd.html?ref=science
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