Found this interesting post in my RSS reader this morning on Another Early Morning.

I’ve heard about 3D scanners before, but I never knew that the technology has become so advanced.

As you can see that proFORMA produces “nice” geometry, does texture mapping and captures textures. It’s not officially called a scanner, but a “system allowing on-line (live) generation of textured 3D models.”. Well what I’ve seen from the video it’s a 3D scanner.

These kind of things always make me think how’s it done. I think that you have to have some kind of depth camera (like ZCam). Can you get depth from 2 cameras positioned like 10 to 20 degrees from one another? Yeah, you know the ray from each cam to the pixel, and where the lines from each cam meet, there’s the pixel. But you’d have to have an really precise algorithm for matching pixels. It’s all about filtering pixels to get some key points for the model. I know there’s a filter for edge detection (Sobel filter), there’s probably a filter for “corner” detection. The only problem I see this might have is scanning convex objects. Anyhow it’s a nice way to build game art. You sculpt the model, paint it and scan it. Or take a pen, stapler and some boxes and make a game from that! Awsome.

But according to this the only thing you need is a web camera. Well, didn’t Microsoft Labs do something like this already? Photosynth? Well anyway, I hope the software’s going to be free.

My cousin Tom, who is widely considered THE smartest member of my family (and who we refer to as “Emmy Nominated Tom” because, well, he is) showed me this video a year ago and it absolutely blew my mind.  Obviously the technology of Photosynth is amazing, but the total geekitude of Blaise Aguera y Arca and his genuine surprise at the crowd’s reaction to the demo just warms my heart and is totally inspiring in its own right.  Here’s a socially awkward guy who’s been holed up creating this beautiful program that totally changes the way that we understand how photos and metadata can be shared and used for great purpose with no idea as to whether people will think this is cool or not.  He just did it for the love of the tech.

Have I mentioned I have a thing for socially awkward geeks?  Yeah…

Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web.

[ source ]

Some videos:

It’s funny to see that Google “suddenly” created a new application called Image Swirl because Microsoft announced Pivot.

Oh because we are talking about images. I just came across this movie about CSI. Nice to see that they bring real technology (aka Photosynth) to the screens:

This truly amazed me!  One day I will make a photosynth from my own photos.  So cool!

za Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs

“no tak, GGL robi własne photosynth.net” – pomyślałem najpierw – “zwłaszcza, że MS zrobił już w pełni funkcjonalnym w Sliverlight… to będzie dobry przykład, żeby zrezygnować z Flasha, ale na rzecz HTML 5″… a tu się okazuje, że to nie ta bajka…

chodzi tylko o wspomaganie wyszukiwania, a nie tworzenie panoram, czy VR… Swirl to pomysł wizualizację wyników wyszukiwania – akurat dla do obrazów, bo dla txt jest Wonder Wheel

grupowanie wyników – skoro GGL to robi (jak zwykle nie jako pierwszy, ale (chyba) dobrze) to znaczy, że mam dobry argument do własnej pracy “dlaczego grupowanie wyników”… mogę nawet przytoczyć cytat z w/w posta: “These aren’t just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images.” <- dokładnie  na tej zasadzie działa mój prototyp

z resztą, wcześniej GGL potwierdził, postulowaną przeze mnie, potrzebę możliwości zadawania zapytań analitycznych poprzez udostępnienie Squared – thanx GGL

Another tool that has great potential for journalists and crowd-sourced photo conversation projects is Microsoft’s Photosynth, which allows you to automatically assemble 3D tours and almost sculptural assemblages from photosets.

Check out this virtual tour of the Oslo Town Hall where the Nobel peace prize is awarded.

In this video Photosynth architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas talks about exciting ways this technology can be used to crawl through the millions of images on the web and effectively create a new hyperlinked visual structure.

There is also a google maps plug-in that lets you mash-up synths and maps.

News organisations have already seen the value of using the tool to cover big events and to crowd-source images from their viewers. From the photosynth blog:

Without a doubt, the highlight of the Photosynth’s first year was the Presidential Inauguration on January 20th. BothCNN and MSNBC featured synths of the moment at which the President took the oath of office, and CNN gave Photosynth 20 minutes of airtime over a five day period. These were tricky synths to shoot and assemble. MSNBC used just a few professional photographers, while CNN augmented its professionals with its “iReports” community.

CNN’s iReport synth of viewers “where were you” moment as Obama was sworn in received more than 9,000 submissions from people who were at the inauguration, or watched it at home and is a marvelous community assembled photo document.

Unfortunately only Windows users can create synths at the moment but you can view on Mac.

A well composed Photosynth can offer an interesting way to explore 3D space. Even better when the content is as interesting as the method of exploration. Above is a distorted view captured from the Neil Gaiman’s Library Photosynth which allows you to explore the personal collection of the author.

Normally I would enjoy just browsing the shelves, but I also enjoyed the timeliness of the discovery. Tonight I was discussing Coraline with my daughter who mentioned “Coraline kind of got lucky in the end. Without the help of the talking cat she would have been in trouble.”

The nosy voyeur and the father are happy, now on to the Silverlight side. I only found about all this from a single tweet by Mr. @neilhimself.

You can follow through the reply links to find that Neil was discussing that the Photosynth was running via Silverlight and that @damonbuxton was not happy about it.

As a “Silverlight guy”, it felt good to see one of my favorite authors choose not to discriminate against the technology for the sake of it being something you have to download, if you don’t already have it.

And now I want to go to the store and pick up The Graveyard Book…

Today has seen me trying my hand at a little bit of photography. Equipped with my state of the art 3 megapixel camera on my phone, I decided to try and create a decent Synth on Photosynth.

Photosynth is an application that allows you to take a series of photos and mash them all together to create an interactive 3D image.

You can see some decent examples by following the link, but I would like to show you what I have conjured up with my first attempt.

Trinity Building Synth

Trinity Building Pic

The trinity building is a common room where I live where people can play pool, watch telly, etc

Over the next few days i’m going to attempt to create some better synths. Once I have created something which I think is quite decent, I will create a short video showing you how you can create your own.

There’s a special place in my heart for Photosynth.  I feel like it’s a sibling that left the house and damnit, is going to live however it wants.  Our teams used to be one, working side by side to deliver glorious experiences, and are now separated by a massive gulf on the org chart.  In any case, I like what they have done, and continue to do.

Speaking of which, they’ve introduced a cool new feature in their latest update, the overhead view.  They turn off images, take you up top and show you the point cloud in all of its glory.  I’d talk more about it, but David Gedye says it much better than I possibly could in the video below.  Listen to what he has to say, and check out their blog post for some additional information and smaller features.

Another exciting development in the Photosynth-o-sphere (yeah, I went there), is cool tech from GRAIL, the University of Washington department that helped with the original Photosynth code.  They’ve tweaked the algorithm used to match photos to make it much faster and able to handle more than a few hundred or thousand images.  The result is simply stunning, synths of entire cities instead of individual scenes or monuments.  Check it out:

-Kevin Hanes

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft that creates a program to hyperlink every associative image on the web to merge into amazing 3D visual space of the particular subject of the images.

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

Jensen

It’s another beautiful day in Tokyo! After yesterday’s entry, I went out for a walk to take some photos around the hotel. What resulted is a beautiful 314 photo Photosynth set of the plaza outside of Shinjuku station…

It was off to have a quick lunch at the station and then off to the Harajuku area. It’s known as one of the trendier districts in Tokyo and is full of boutiques, clothing shops, and some of the most interesting fashion I’ve ever seen. Sundays are typically the day when the younger folk get dressed up and go hang out in the streets. Cosplayers are no exception here, and they typically hang out on the bridge next to the station…

…at least, that’s what I’ve been told. There was a very small showing yesterday, as I think most of them were over at TGS showing off their art. There was, however, something pretty interesting going on at the Meiji Shrine next to the station. There was apparently some sort of traditional event going on and folks were carrying around what looked like a portable shrine and chanting.

The shrine itself was pretty cool. As one of the more famous shrines in the Tokyo area, it was teeming with tourists and sightseers. Not wanting to be outdone, I quickly set to work with the camera and snapped a whole bunch of photos. On the way in, we passed a wall of sake barrels. These were all donated by local brewing companies (for good fortune, perhaps?) and set on display.

With a city as large as Tokyo, it’s also not very common to see a lot of heavily wooded areas. Our guide tells us that all of the trees in the area were planted after World War II to help restore the area to it’s natural beauty. The shrine itself is also not that old and was built around the same era.

Once close to the main gate, we all took part in the ritual hand cleansing. I think I probably should have taken a bath there. I’m sure it’s just more than my hands that are dirty…

The shrine is also a popular place for weddings. We saw two separate parties, one posing outside and then another inside. Both looked like traditional ceremonies and I one procession even came through while we were inside.

Having the procession go through also provided the unique opportunity of having the area mostly clear of people. Not to miss the opportunity, I snapped another set of pictures for use in Photosynth.

With that out of the way, it was time to move on. We left the temple and wandered out into the main streets of Harajuku. The crowds were out in full force and it was difficult making our way through the streets.

There were a lot of interesting little clothing stores (many of them featuring Goth/Loli fashion) and plenty of stands selling Crepes. We couldn’t resist the temptation and wound up with one each. I went for one with peaches, strawberry ice cream, and whipped cream. Yum yum!

We were tempted to stop at each stand for one, but I’m sure that would have made us very very sick. One was enough for us. While we were walking and browsing, a couple groups from the shrine was making their way up the street carrying their shrine and chanting. It was pretty cool to watch and my friend even got pulled in to help out (look for him around at around 0:45)!

It was a pretty cool experience for him and apparently a very rare one. He must prayed for the right thing while at the shrine earlier. Once through the side street, we hit one of the main streets in Harajuku. Most of the stores here are western based, including a newly opened Forever 21 and the H&M building. There were areas set up outside for people to line up to go inside. They’re both very popular among trendy Japanese women and get special attention.

We took the opportunity to do a little shopping in some of the gift boutiques on one of the side streets and picked up some nice little souvenirs. Not going to post a picture of what I bought so I don’t ruin any gift surprises! As it was getting late, we decided to move on to our final objective for the day: Shibuya.

Similar to Harajuku, Shibuya is mainly a shopping district popular among the younger crowd. There are a lot of large department stores and western style shops there, as well as one of the most famous intersections in all of Tokyo. Right outside the Hachiko exit of Shibuya station, this 5-way intersection is featured in many films, photographs, and documentaries. It’s often used as an example to show how modern and busy Japan is. Of course, I had to go across it and film the whole experience!

Also in that area of Shibuya was the famous statue of Hachiko. It was modeled after the famous dog from 1920’s Japan who would faithfully wait for his master to return from work even after he passed away. For the full story around Hachiko, check out the wikipedia entry.

A walk through Shibuya pretty much ended our day. We somehow managed to walk from Shibuya to Harajuku (took about half an hour) and took the train back into Shinjuku. Dinner was our last stop, along with a little shopping. We found a nice little drinking parlor with traditional seating and a la carte food service. I’d seen places like this in anime before, but it was nice to actually go to one.

The food was delicious and atmosphere was great. The only dangerous thing about the restaurant was that the food was all ordered via a touch screen. What made it even worse was that I figured out how the thing worked (it was all in Japanese with pictures) and ended up ordering a bunch of drinks and food.

Look for more tomorrow!

I have been super slack updating this of late, but rest assured there are a few posts in draft format that will be up soon.

But in the absence of a proper post I thought I would share some of the interesting things I have been reading over the last week.

HabitatUK return to Twitter on Digital Tip

It was in June that HabitatUK learnt the power of social media when they jumped on Twitter and used trending topic hashtags (the most tasteless was the Iran Election) to push signups to their marketing database and furniture discounts . As the blogger who broke the news, and then watched it break all records on Social Media Today, I am very relieved to see them back on Twitter. The case has been used as a benchmark of the cynical use of hashtag spam, been written up on countless posts, news stories and talked about on Twitter. Even though HabitatUK apologised through me via another blog post, and then promptly blamed their intern as the cause of the hashtag spam, they didn’t respond back on Twitter. Until now.

Where Gen Y Leads, Others Follow on Millennial Marketing

A new book,  featured yesterday in USA Today,  says Millennials have significantly impacted retailer practices in technology and merchandising. Titled ’Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens, and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail’, they call Gen Y “the taste-makers, influencers, and most enthusiastic buyers of today,” who will become “the mature, high-income purchasers of the future.”  The authors conducted surveys and focus groups, interviewed hundreds of Gen Yers, spoke with retail executives and spent lots of time in malls.

Building Rome in less than a day with Photosynth on Geek in Disguise

The University of Washington has built a Photosynth of Rome using 150,000 photos from Flickr and it’s mighty impressive. It took them 21 hours for Rome using Flickr and Photosynth and they’ve also been busy with Dubrovnik and Venice. Check out Dubrovnik below and you’ll see that the resulting synth really is quite amazing. They’re literally reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web.

Wispa Gold Gives Advertising Space To Its Fans on PSFK

To celebrate the return of Wispa Gold and say thank you to fans of the chocolate bar, Cadbury is offering up £2 million worth of advertising space for fans to potentially have their  personal messages displayed on the brand’s billboards throughout the UK and Ireland. Fans need to log in to Wispa Gold Messages and submit their message along with an explanation of why it is special to them. A panel of Wispa Gold fans will select certain ‘gold’ messages which deserve the limelight, and those messages will be displayed on the billboards. If participants need help in designing their message, a panel of Wispa helpers is on hand.

Malaysia: Social Media and Facebook numbers on Laurel Papworth

Malaysian Internet users like Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster. They’re also connecting via Twitter, LindedIn and Plaxo, and eBlogger. They use resources such as Slideshare, iTunes, Flickr, and YouTube.  Nine of the Top 20 websites in Malaysia are social networking sites, and the top 6 sites are Yahoo!, Facebook, Google.com.my, YouTube, Google.com, and Blogger.

Anyone who saw the last Batman movie remembers his fictional sonar technology that gathers sonic information from every cell phone in the city and makes a “composite sonar map” from the data. The technology in this clip is like that, only REAL! The slight difference being it uses supercomputers to focus on compositing image data from Flickr instead of cell phones.