Photos = 3D

I discovered Microsoft Photosynth this past week. If you have not tried out the demo, you really should. Basically the program takes a bunch of pictures of the same place and finds the similarities between them to construct a 3D space. You can zoom in on individual pictures or fly around the 3D environment. I was very impressed. In the Virtual Earth blog they had an entry about CSI using the program, it has a YouTube of the show.

It is a very cool concept, and it could easily be taken further. Like for example using standard video fotage of a scene to create the 3D space. How about combining various sources of data to create a hybrid source of data? 2 or 3 security cameras, motion sensors, RFID, to construct a full 3D scene in full motion. Of course their would need to be some way to syncronize the time of each individual source of data for it to be used. The video should be able to use recognition techniques to find a moving object common to all sources and capture it passing a fixed reference point (also in all sources) and thus syncronize it roughly as the object passes the same reference point.

A scene in full motion 3D would be invaluable in solving crimes and traffic accidents. It shouldn't be long before most cars will come equiped to store video and other stats that are more readily available (of course there are obvious privacy issues). But, the ability to construct a full motion 3D scene of a traffic accident would save investigators countless hours, as well as giving valuable information to car manufactures to help avoid crashes.

Heck if we want to take it to the extreme, you could have a service that people could opt into to provide all video from their vehicle and it would be processed for poor drivers. The vehicles of the poor drivers would get marked in the system based on the make, model, color and ultimately the license plate. If your vehicle camera spots one of the marked vehicles it could let you know (maybe that is paranoid, but maybe there is something there). The service could be tied to other GPS/navigation information like traffic (real time, other vehicles in the service could all be bouncing back and forth data to let all the users what the conditions are). Ok, I realize this is getting very 1984ish. So, I'll stop.