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The Making of Photosynth from Nathanael Lawrence on Vimeo.

The video above looks at the making of Photosynth, its informative and provides a glimpse of where Photosynth is going.

In truth we are simply at the beginning of being able to take crowd sourced or self taken imagery and automatically construct scenes, it is without question however an exciting beginning.

We have a feeling that in a few years time we will be explaining to our students that to create a 3D building we used to actually manually draw in the polygons, line by line, window by window and door by door.

We are close to it all becoming automatic and while we may miss the ‘hand made approach’ and indeed the argument is about to start that there will always be a role of ‘hand made’ digital architecture, we think its only a few years off becoming automated.

In the same way that Google Earth/Google Maps changed the field of GIS, the technologies behind Photosynth maybe about to change the world of architectural visualisation.

See also Can Photosynth Change The World Of Architecture? (we think it can btw…)

4 Comments

  • gutowski says:

    i would not expect that to change the world of architecture since it is a step in a different direction. google earth gave me a view from above, this one lets me look around. i do not rely on google earth when working with gis and i do not expect myself to put photosynth next to sketchup or photoshop. it seems like photosynth is going to be an online service like virtual earth and it is not giving the ability to import any 3d. the ‘point cloud’ is just a tiny particle of what 3d users need.

  • Anonymous says:

    I don’t get it. How can a system that relies on real architecture/photo’s change the world of architecture?

  • Anonymous says:

    I don’t think it is that hard to see how architectural visualization would be affected by this in the years to come. Currently the tech is in it’s infancy, as the post points out, but it is expected to grow quickly. What is a point cloud today could very well be an intelligent BIM within 5 years.

    If a hand modeled conceptual building could be shown in it’s intended environment from any view with such little effort, it would add a much greater sense of placement without all of the extra effort currently involved to hand model the construction’s surroundings, or even doing a relatively simple photo comp. So even if we will still be hand modeling the main subject for conceptual work, the terms photo comp and site match could be history.

  • Anonymous says:

    It would be a lot more inspiring if it wasn’t owned by Microsoft.

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