3D Phototourism

At the TTI vanguard conference in Barcelona - Steven Stetz from the University of Washington gave us a glimpse of the photo-viewers of the future.  In short he takes multiple 2D images (say from flickr) of a particular locatiuon and "stiches" them together to create a 3D model.

Very impressive stuff. The power of the navigation between the images is stunning.

Well worth seeing the video demos on his web site.  The part of the video on the Great Wall got my particular attention, gievn that my own charity trek there is onky a few weeks away now.

Quite apart from creating rich "phototourism" experiences I can see many business industrial applications for this, especially around large manufacuring plants, civil engineering etc.

Microsofts's Photosynth work is based on Steven's research. Also well worth a visit.

A new way of looking at Alice

We've been doing a lot of work on visualisation of data - mostly geographic - recently. Martin Brown, one of my project managers, drew this to my attention. It's part "intellectual toy" and part tool that graphically represents the raltionship between words in a text. (How it is done is explianed on TextArc's web site here.) Quite apart from looking cool it has got me thinking again about how we can make better use of the enormous graphical power available in today's PCs to make sense of the vast quantities of data we increasingly surround ourselves with. Our eyes are very good at detecting patterns that even the most sophisticted algorithms miss! I'm thinking about email and a smartner way to wade through that than Google Desktop!

Try it yourself here (java app)

If 2 minds are better than one then how about 2 thousand?

if 2 minds are better than one...
Originally uploaded by lynetter

I've been a great admirer of Lynette Webb's insights into new media and the impact of the Internet.

I also *really* like the way she uses CC images from Flickr to illustrate her points (and not just because she's used my own images!!)

This particular example really got me thinking - especially about why it is so hard to get teams at work to buy into this!