National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Photo: Flickr Pictures Help Build 3-D Rome in a Day


Email to a Friend	<< Back to Full Story

Resembling a Georges-Pierre Seurat painting, a "point cloud" re-creation of the Colosseum in Rome is among the landmarks recently given digital life by a new photo-matching computer program.

The program, unveiled in September 2009, downloads multiple images of a landmark and finds common points in the architecture. From this information, it can to calculate the subject's 3-D structure and where the people who took the shots must have been standing (marked with black cones in the video still above).

Video still courtesy University of Washington GRAIL