Posts Tagged photos

Photofly : Real 3D from Photos : Cloud Computing Magic : #bim #cloud

While I have not taken this for a test drive yet the videos and technology behind this are impressive and could provide a very valuable tool set.  First, a word about technology.  Too many times software presupposes too much knowledge or interest on the user, that is this software can do some amazing stuff you just have to sit down with it, go through the manual, try and use it, sit in a classroom, hit the user groups, etc. to master it and make it a useful and successfully incorporate into your workflow.  If you are like me you might be open minded to that but the benefits of learning a brand new software package have to be pretty amazing to entertain that process.  Enter Photofly.  From what I have pulled up and I included two videos here you upload standard digital photographs, which could range from your iphone to your 18 Megapixel Digital SLR, and Photofly does its magic in the cloud utilizing its own servers to render a photographic 3D image, that can be scaled using a known dimension to a dimensionally correct model that can also be exported to AutoCAD as a pointcloud.  What?!$%  From my perspective this is invaluable, and brings to the forefront technology that was only available from laser scanners.  I am not saying this takes their place but any time you can put another arrow in your quiver for building surveying and documentation, the better.  And if this is as intuitive as these 2 videos make it out to be, this is a home run.

Photofly Intro Video

Wrigley Field Gets Modeled From Tourist Photos

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3D from Photographs : #BIM #3D

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…

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