Building 3D Models On the Fly With a Webcam 93
blee37 writes "Here is an excellent video demonstration of a new program developed by Qi Pan, a graduate student, and other researchers at the University of Cambridge. The 'ProFORMA' software constructs a 3D model of an object in real time from (commodity) webcam video. The user can watch the program deduce more pieces of the 3D model as the object is moved and rotated. The resulting graphics are of high quality."
Re:3D vision for robots (Score:3, Informative)
The idea is not stupid, but it also isn't new [wikipedia.org]. It is just turns out to be a little harder to get working in practice than you might think..
Re:Academic projects versus commercial application (Score:4, Informative)
The major reason that these types of programs don't get expanded into commercial products or bought and integrated into existing products is that they are cute tech demos but not particularly real-world interesting.
Almost without exception anything simple enough for these types of reconstruction programs to handle is too simple to bother with. The paper church in the demo video for instance. The final wire-frame product is, sadly, crap. Neat and interesting crap but still crap. There are at least 3 times the polys that the form needs and almost all of the significant edges are in the wrong place. In the time it would take to clean up the data into something worth using I could build a better model form scratch including textures.
There are perhaps some very niche uses for this in terms of augmented reality. It could be integrated into a game or chat program to give a more realistic version of those make-an-avatar-from-your-webcam gimmicks that seem to gain attention every once and a while. If this guy has developed some very good algorithms he might get the interest of some of the match-moving software companies like Syntheyes.
But the reason this kind of this never shows up in profesional 3D packages is that if you are good enough to be using the software professionally you are good enough not to need these kinds of crutches. It's the 3D equivalent of Dreamweaver's auto-generated spaghetti code.
This is not new (Score:2, Informative)
I haven't read the article yet, but there's already a program doing this with cheap cameras, version 1.0 was free:
http://www.david-laserscanner.com/
Re:Aside from pirating... (Score:1, Informative)
Have you looked on bittorrent? *ducks from flying legal noise*
Simultaneous location and mapping (Score:4, Informative)
That's called "simultaneous location and mapping", and in the last five years, good algorithms have been developed and quite a few systems are more or less working. Search for "Visual SLAM".
The Samsung Hauzen vacuum cleaner uses Visual SLAM. There's a video. [youtube.com] This is way ahead of the blundering Roomba.