Take a look at the movie below and make sure you watch it all the way through – note the export of the model from photosynth into a stand alone 3D package:
This opens up the possibility of using photosynth as a free 3D scanner, and one that would work on objects up to the building level scale. It seems to be early days but there is a lot of discussion going on around the tutorial here.
If anyone has any more insight do let us know via the comments…
A bit offtopic but perhaps interesting as well:
One fact about psynth is the need for quite a lot of pictures of the object or scene in the first place. A nice workaround (apart from grabbing public images from flickr) is using a hd-camera and cutting the video into frames to go on with the psynth-processing.
That’s an interesting point – so just film around an object in HD, save as frames and upload.
Do you have any examples?
Andy
There is another free web service called Arc3D that exports point-cloud models from digital photos without that much hacking. It’s at http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~visit3d/webservice/v2/
Actually I just tried it once – on myself 😉
You`ll find the synth on my blog http://achim-tack.squarespace.com/blog/2009/6/11/videosynth-punktwolke.html The video was done in 1024×768 at 15 fps.
Arc3D is interesting, we have been meaning to give it a try so now is a good chance – we will post some thoughts soon as we get chance.
The synth is impressive – 1024×768 seems to work really well.
I`m testing ARC3D at the moment with some shots of the manhattan skyline. Going to post some results as soon as I have them.
Perhabs DU could do a post or two about MS Image Composite Editor and Seadragon? In my opinion that`s two really impressive technologies for getting fast and accurate panoramas and a good access to 50mp+ pictures: http://achim-tack.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/21/grobrand.html
BTW: It was just a fire in a local factory – looks far more impressive than it actually was.