Taking a Trip in 3-D

Reported September 2007

Seattle, Wash. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- As your digital pictures quickly add up, going through them can be overwhelming. But experimental software makes it easy to find just the picture you want … and gives you a 3-D view into photo collections.

Click by click by click ... you quickly build up your collection of digital photos, until,,,

"I don't want to take the time to go through all these pictures," Wilmot Li, amateur photographer, says.

But experimental software from the University of Washington organizes your photos in a special way, so you can look through them as if you were there.

"So you could seamlessly move from one photo to the other and have the experience that a real person would have standing in front of the building and looking around," Steve Seitz, associate professor from the University of Washington, says.

Computer scientist Noah Snavely helped develop the photo tourism software using computer vision techniques. Click on each pyramid to see a picture of the building from a different angle. You can zoom in and out, move left and right … almost like a video game. The software can also sort through thousands of online pictures of a place. It looks for overlap in the images.

"It takes these photos, reasons about where they must have been taken, then builds up a 3-D model of the scene automatically," Snavely says.

The ultimate goal -- to create an online index so we can take a virtual tour through the entire world. Snavely will continue to develop photo-tourism for his doctoral thesis. He says real estate agencies, museums and hotels could use it to give potential customers a virtual tour of their products. Microsoft is already using a version of the software.

The Optical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Noah Snavely
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
(206) 669-7097
snavely@cs.washington.edu

Optical Society of America
Washington, DC
(202) 223-8130
http://www.osa.org
info@osa.org

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