I have a soft spot for everything Virtual Reality. Although it is no longer fashionable to use that name, we’re seeing a lot of related technology pop up all over the map. More and more movies are shown in 3D. Mostly children’s animation movies for now, but IMAX too is jumping on the train. And the number of augmented reality expirments out there is uncountable.
I haven’t posted much about all this, because most of the technology is still in its infancy and requires a hefty time investment. However, Microsoft has been silently improving a related tool called Photosynth. While it’s not Virtual Reality or “true” 3D, it could be an important part of a true virtual reality engine.
Photosynth allows you to upload a number of photographs of an object or room. It then goes through this set of images and virtually reconstructs that room or object. You get a nice interface to navigate around. Lets look at this example of all my pictures of the Statue of Liberty I took on my holiday:
It’s only based on 11 photos, so it’s not as good as it could have been, but I think the front portion of the statue came out great. Photosynth figures out the overlapping portions in fotos and calculates the angles under which the pictures were taken. It’s ingenious, and the simplicity of the interface hides a lot of very complicated Math, I’m sure.
If you want some better examples of what Photosynth is capable of, take a look at this Google map.
If only we could get access to all that 3 dimensional data, great stuff would happen. So Microsoft, could you please give us an extensive API for this little miracle of software so we don’t need to mess with Python scripts?