Coming up of the
Autodesk Labs,
Photofly allows users to generate 3D models from their photographs. Using cloud computing, and generating point-data models, this software is pretty intriguing.
If you haven't already, bookmark the
Autodesk Labs website now, to keep up to speed with neat add-on's and software experiments being produced by Autodesk.
Photofly works around a similar concept to
Photosynth, which you should have seen by now on TED Talks or
their website here, both generate a virtual position of the image capturing device in relation to the viewed image, and by compiling a data set around the image's subject (demonstrated on PhotoFly with buildings, miniatures, faces, and mountains!), the outcome is produced. Where Photosynth foregrounds the viewer – its graphic interface is a stunning 'cloud' of 2D photographs – PhotoFly is more interested in digital data, and removes any sense of viewing the data from a fixed point by generating a fairly dense data-cloud of points in a 3D digital environment.
Images captured from Introductory Video.
The aesthetic of the rendered data-clouds is pretty intriguing, ghosting in and out of 'being-there', with wonderful digital shadows generated in the elusive edges of the model. As raw data, the point-cloud –depending on your tenacity and skill with other modelling software– could be a fuster-cluck of editing, but we've seen in Radiohead's
'House of Cards' video, that the results can be stunning.
Pragmatically speaking, this isn't (and was probably never meant to be) a reliable modelling tool for any professional documentation, but they do throw in a couple of neat tricks that have some interesting benefits.
The first is that the generated model can quite easily be scaled, simply by introducing a few known dimensions. What this allows, as is demonstrated in the video, is a level of accuracy across the whole model for dimensions which were originally unknown. Could be useful for particularly tricky dimensions, or hard-to-reach spots (like mountain ranges).
Visual interface which allows scaling of the model.
The other, sort of cheeky application of PhotoFly, is made possible by its unobtrusive data-collection method. Fly-by photo-grabs of new buildings, or rarely visited monuments, or fenced-off areas could allow you to generate models for all sorts of spaces, one of the 'whoa' moments in the video is a model of two mountains – which does in the end raise some ethical questions – ones which GoogleMaps have already encountered, should we be allowed to go modelling all these spaces? Does the data actually have any value?
Check out the introductory
video here
And more details about PhotoFly at
Autodesk Labs here.