And I wonder if this image combining technology could be plugged into the U.S. military simulation of Earth for greater realism.

Steven is accompanied by a guy in a red shirt and a pretty blonde lady behind him. They are just to the left and to the front of the basilica.

Wild and unexpected!

Honestly the power of that software is mind boggling to me. This must have involved thousands of work hours and unbelievable amounts of code. It really isn’t that simple a task to get image recognition software to “see” that this image and that image “line up” and to match them. Now imagine doing that when it only “roughly” lines up as in the case of Notre Dam there and you get a picture of just what they had to do. And, further, to get it to put it together in 3D, recognizing that the image had DEPTH to it and wasn’t just a 2D shape. Well, I’m stunned. As with all programs of this scope, I can imagine no one programmer knows entirely how it works, what with individual “modules” being programmed by different people (modern programming is set up in such a way that all a programmer working on one module needs to know is the input/output/operator commands of other modules to get their own module to work nice with them).

Working with text is actually easier than working with images. I imagine that a similar tactic could be used to gather vast overall “verbal pictures” of related research documents. Expanding on this, a computer might actually be able to draw complicated conclusion (I’m talking “next step” stuff here, but after seeing this it can’t be that far off) based on all this metadata. I can see a computer comparing vast fields of images on earth, with time also being a factor so it has a past and future, and also in various wavelengths and even just charts of stuff like pollution and so on, and actually being able to give an educated opinion on the direction of earth’s climate. From there, maybe even a suggestion on how to change things, adding in the text data from various research papers. Keep in mind that THAT is much further down the line, but it’s all the forward march of programming technology. If they can do this, and it isn’t just a “artistic model” but real time examples they are showing, I can’t see how the rest isn’t anything more than a lot of work and research away from now.

I can see a time in the future when we surf the net not just with data searches but with a dedicated AI buddy that culls it for information relevent to us, based on what we’ve wanted to search for in the past, and one who provides us with suggestions, only something that actually seems friendly and eerily accurate and not just the Amazon.com “people who got this also liked: ” list. These are the sorts of things that change the world in the information age.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on this kind of software. I’d love to take a ton of pictures of something and have a scalable, three dimensional view as an end product. It puts photostitching to shame.

Thanks for this, Phil. This will go in my mental scrapbook of when I first saw some cool technology.

I can also see applications in the field of forensic police work. Imagine being able to place a suspect’s avatar in a 3-D model of a crime scene, and examine the possibilities (JFK assassination, for example).

However, I can also see the possibility of misuse, an evolution if you will, of the practice of photoshopping celebrity faces onto nude bodies.

Also, there is a website (www.fixedearth.com) in which the writer already accuses NASA of inventing the images we see from Hubble and other telescopes, because of the term “adaptive optics” and the current use of virtual imaging. This technology will only fuel the suspicions of the ignorant, and give them more percieved ammunition.

Re copyright: if you put your photo’s on flickr, doesn’t that automatically mean that everybody can use your pictures?

something off topic Phil, this is an intresting story you might want to cover
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/06/04/213350.aspx
watch this video
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2007_05_12/192secondHover.mpg

Microsoft think they own the Internet. Blecccch.

Of course, as one of the above posters pointed out, it would be next to useless in research environments…Sour grapes, I know.;)

If/when this ever migrates to a released web platform or what have you, I’m sure they’ll work on the UI.

However, from listening to the presenter and his explanations of the images and metadata, I can see perhaps a problem with copyright infringement.

But it is… wonderful.