Slashgeo

Microsoft's Photosynth, previously on Slashgeo, is now available as a technology preview. From Very Spatial: "The Photosynth demos show you the point cloud that was generated for each photo collection, and then you can navigate around and see each photo in its referenced location and look at the 3D rendering of the photos. Even though it’s not even a beta yet, I just think it’s cool. Many, many possibilities come to mind again, of course, by linking Photosynth to a virtual globe, such as, let’s say, Virtual Earth 3D…" Spatially Adjusted offers screenshots.

SlashDot is currently running a discussion on another technology along the likes of Photosynth by Microsoft. To help you differentiate between the two, a co-author of the new tech wrote in one of his comments on SlashDot : "I also worked on the Photo Tourism project (which is related to Photosynth). There's a big difference between Photosynth and this new 3D reconstruction work, in that Photosynth takes a photo collection and reconstructs camera positions and a sparse point cloud (a set of disconnected 3D points floating in space), while in this new work we build *dense* 3D models of scenes (in the form of polygon meshes). Dense models are usually much better for use in applications like computer graphics, since they can be used to render scenes with much more photo-realism."

Here is SlashDot's summary : "The billion of images available from a site like Flickr has stimulated the imagination of many researchers. After designing tools using Flickr to edit your photos, another team at the University of Washington (UW) is using our vacation photos to create 3D models of world landmarks. But recreating original scenes is challenging because all the photos we put on Flickr and similar sites don't exhibit the same quality. With such a large number of pictures available, the researchers have been able to reconstruct with great accuracy virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York City."