Building 3D Models On the Fly With a Webcam

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:The Death of Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually while you laugh it could allow all sorts of fun stuff because you can model that tie fighter or spaceport by hand if necessary, then visualize and convert it to a 3d model. I don't know about you, but there's lots of things I can do easier with raw materials and my hands that would look good as a model that if I was to model in 3d would take a lot longer to produce...

Hello 'Likeness Theft'

[kbob88]

I can just see it now -- anyone who can get a bit of video of you can create a 3-D models of your face and body, and then do anything with the likeness. When rendering gets really good, this could be a bit embarrassing. Instead of 2D retouched photos of celebrities and politicians, we'll be seeing hacked up 'animated' (but realistic) video of them doing all sorts of wild stuff. Well, it might be a boon to the porn industry, at least in the short-term before the rendering software becomes available to consumers.

Re:The Death of Hollywood

[McNihil]

Or why not let the viewer choose who plays that part... Angelina Jolie with those perky ones from the Tomb Raider movies for instance. How about watching Cassablanca as yourself as Bogart? Now how about being Dekkard in Blade Runner? The only thing that is needed is the motion capture of believable performances that's all.

Re:The Death of Hollywood

[Quantumstate]

I think the OP was implying that this new technique might be useful for making the graphics for these things. Since it has only just been created it would indeed be very surprising if open source games had used it to make great graphics already.

3D vision for robots

[cptnapalm]

I was thinking about robots one day and I was wondering why those who work on computer vision didn't do something like this. Instead of trying to get the machine to understand the analog world, why wouldn't it be better for the machine to have an internal representation of the world by making a 3d map? Quake 3 CoffeeShop, if you will.

The idea I had was that the vision system creates a 3d map with entities, mapped from the vision system as well, inside. The AI works within the 3d representation of the world. If the AI wants to move from A to B, it signals the body controlling subsystem to start walking. When the 3d representation, being informed by the vision system, tells the AI that it is at point B, then the AI signals to stop walking.

Hardware constraints not withstanding, is this model any good?

I'm just a lowly, early middle aged novice C programmer who has never actually done anything with robotics, so if what I said made no sense or is obviously idiotic, I do understand that my ideas are comin' outta my ass.

Academic projects versus commercial applications

[Frans Faase]

There seems to be a huge gap between these kind of academic projects and the commercial available programs. I have come across several commenrcial applications that can do these kind of things, but these applications cost at least a 1000 dollars or even more. And then there are all these academic projects (going on for at least two decades), which present nice video's and papers, and sometimes release some software. But when you look at the software, you discover that you first have to download nine other package and compile the whole thing and what you get is some kind of script you have to run, with all sorts of command line options. But sofar, I have never found an application with a solid interface on the level of the Gimp or Blender for the matter of the fact. I find this rather strange. I am almost getting the impression that some of the results are sold to the developers of the commercial packages.