anyhow– attaching deep data to 3d has again been the goal for over a decade… X3D is 3d plus XML — specifically designed as the major extention of the earlier VRML language for this reason….
its success or failure though has been political and financial, now more than ever as the 3rd web3d bubble rages on and masses of newbies reinvent web3d wheels for fame and vc glory:)

every flash site is now a virtual world, and everything 3d is now avatars…..- this demo thankfully excluded- which is why i dont see it as a future of the metaverse interface, but only , and it seem we agree, as a single presentation interface that may or may not offer any real power vs many others that will be shown.

The work out of London for city planning and urban issues is a great practical use for this stuff, avatars or not, and is really compelling to look at if not necessarily participate in.

I’ve written elsewhere (who knows which post it was, I don’t tag very well) that my interest is NOT in augmented reality or mirror worlds. I’m far more interested in immersive environments. I’m also of the opinion that we can find clues for how these immersive environments will evolve by looking at what other tools and visual languages are evolving in related fields.

I DO think Photosynth, or at least the idea of photographic artefacts layered over 3D spaces, when combined with some of the other technologies that are evolving, does suggest that the mirror world will be far richer than a 3D version of a bunch of buildings, that it will have layers of data far different than how we think of information on “flat” Web pages, and that as these forms of visualization expand and improve and eventually add avatars that we’ll be opening up a new language for conceptualizing space and content.

My interest, however, as I say, is in extrapolating to immersive worlds, because its there that the deep sense of presence and, as you say, confrontation, not only allows us to access these deeper models for information display, but to combine those with avatar expression, identity, immersion, and emotion - and that it is THIS combination that will open the door to a paradigm shift that hopefully won’t go the way of the Video phone (which, by the way, CISCO is making every attempt to resurrect hehe).

The sence of place is marred by the static nature of the still photography. one feels no sence of the imediate, which is part immersion.

Even after adding avatars as the mediating interface, the app, like papervision( 2d flash) limited “fully 3d ” navigation at a constant presentation level, feels more presentational than confrontational. with is a key factor for in scene immersion psychologically.

i think it’ll just end up another tech demo for the portfolio.

BTW- the whole 3D MAP- mirror world meme— way overblown. Consider it the VIDEO phone circa ATT 1970.:)

time will tell.

c3

http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-earth-photooverlay-download-and_25.html

http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-geotag-photographs-from-nokia.html

While I imagine that it would be good to get accurate measures of location based on some sort of computer cross-match to geographies, I also wonder whether that doesn’t end up getting solved in the long run by the photographers themselves. Based on how they put this together, they’ve been able to create a 3D object out of different photos taken at different times and have been able to compute the exact location of each camera in reference to that object. Doesn’t it just take one of those photographers to also tag the photo with a GPS position?

So, for example, while its Google, synch Photosynth up to something like their GPI synch application:

http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/

You bring up the intriguing idea that the photos themselves can stitch together an actual “textured build”. On that front, start to wonder whether you don’t end up with a mash-up somewhere down the road:

- For an advanced version of a “build” use something like Stanford’s 3D camera:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/march19/camera%20-031908.html
- Map the underlying skeleton of the building using something like Photosynth (which also gives you a deep source of information artefacts)
- Combine the two and import into 3DVIA, Sketch-Up, etc for some more “polished” work
- Probably script some stuff in here while we’re at it, using I’m sure LSL
- Load it up to a Google street view type of thing.

It’s the combination of technology with user-generated inputs that’s so interesting. After all, you can spend 100 years running around with a 3D camera or creating an algorithm to assess geo-positions, or you can count on people out there taking photos anyways and let them tag it with a geosynch iPhone for example.

*head spins*

I gotta lie down I think.

It looks like they are creating some derived geometries of camera and target position, but I am not sure how robust that is. They may be relying more on stitching together the photos to pull things into a topological framework.

The reason I am thinking this is I am wondering how to map things to real world coordinates. Maybe if a frame work were augmented with something like LIDAR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar) deployed a bit like google street view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_street_view) so that the textures from images are mapped on a real-world 3D coordinate framework, we’d have the basis for being able to really create an immersive virtual map of our spaces. A tricky bit will be to deal with the temporal nature of time, since it may be troublesome to see the same seen stitched together, with trees fully leafed in summer, the other with snow drifts.

Taking a different tack… I was looking at the artist’s studio collection in photosynth and was thinking if I could “see” stuff in Second Life like that, it might even be worth going to the various galleries and museums (or even stores). Pais gets tired of waiting for things to rez around him.