BIM, the Built Environment and Stuff

The world wants an easier way to get 3D.  Photographic manipulation has been around for awhile.  I remember sitting in a presentation by Yonald Chery for Mok3 which created photo immersive 3D, and this was back in 2004.  The technology is still used today in something called supertour.  A quote from 2004 at the time-

“This Mok3 thing could be bigger than SketchUp, especially for interior designers and architects,” Geoffrey Moore Langdon tells me. “It is like a PhotoShop that allows you to push-pull the images into correct 3D with the ease of SketchUp. Thus from a single photograph, you quickly create a 3D model:

It was ahead of its time, but we are seeing more entrants into the field.  Autodesk  acquired RealVIZ and its Image Modeler software, you can view a demo here.  And today in the NY Times today there is the article Computers Turn Flat Photos into 3-D Buildings. Where they are using a crowd sourcing/social media aspect to data collection and improving the algorithms to stitch this stuff together.  A project out of Cornell and University of Washington morphed into Microsoft’s Photosynth where you can view 3D images that have been stitched into “quasi 3D”  through a browser.  However,  Photosynth appears to be limited by the number of photographs and data so the bigger desire was to scale this thing.  So the same folks have been crunching more numbers and algorithms to create a more robust platform and a web site called Photocity was created  entice people to add data and create the digital 3D construction of the WORLD, okay maybe not the world but then again…