
Entire Cities Recreated Using Thousands of Flickr Photos - mgcreed
http://thenextweb.com/2009/10/04/entire-cities-recreated-using-tourist-flickr-photos/
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jrockway
This comment republishing feature is annoying -- I do not give anyone
permission to copy my work here to other sites. The use of the Y Combinator
logo is also suspect; I do not speak for YC when I post here (or ever), so I
am not sure why my comments would have a YC logo on them.

Anyway, commenting on the actual content... I guess the algorithm builds 3D
models of structures from the photo. Initially, I thought it would generate
something like Street View. It seems possible to use the 3d dot model in
addition to the photos to create a "photorealistic" virtual world -- has
anyone done this? (This article is very low on details.)

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gacek
Its very similar to what you can do with Microsofts Photosynth, just on a
greater scale. MS lets you upload a couple hundred pictures, which is enough
for a similar 3D dot model for a single building.

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kulkarnic
Actually, this is Photosynth (rather both use th same base tech.) In fact,
city-wide synthing has been possible for some time now- the crux is matching
up the photos fast enough, which has now been reduced to a day (for 1M
photos). For the interested, fast (real-time) matching of video streams was
also demoed at TechFest some year or so ago. I'm pretty sure there's a video
about it somewhere, possibly at TechCrunch.

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NathanKP
I am very impressed with this project. In my opinion this is even better than
Google Maps, which relies on hand modeled structures. I'd like to see Google
implement Flickr reconstructions so that even if no one has hand modeled
buildings there will still be 3D structures there when you zoom in.

Naturally not every place will have such a high photo density but there must
be a lot of cities and tourist sites that can be reconstructed in a similar
manner.

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dhughes
Something like that was announced just yesterday, or very recently, Google is
going to use traffic camera, security camera footage to liven up their maps
with realistic crowd and vehicles, plus I assume part of they could use any
building photo too for their 3D map.

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anigbrowl
That was a private hack from students at Georgia Tech - preprint of their
impressive paper:
[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cpl/projects/augearth/augearth_isma...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cpl/projects/augearth/augearth_ismar_reduce.pdf)

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gojomo
Note that thenextweb.com scrapes your HN comments from here, and republishes
them on their own site, with no way to opt out.

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shalmanese
So does disqus

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RiderOfGiraffes
See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731412>

I thought there were more items submitted at about the same time, but I
haven't been able to find them.

It is very clever.

