*Got some kinda cloudy photogrammetry thing going on here. The Augmented Reality tie-in is left as an exercise for the student.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37021/
3-D Models Created by a Cell Phone
With a few snapshots, you can build a detailed virtual replica.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 2011 BY TOM SIMONITE
Capturing an object in three dimensions needn't require the budget of Avatar. A new cell phone app developed by Microsoft researchers can be sufficient. The software uses overlapping snapshots to build a photo-realistic 3-D model that can be spun around and viewed from any angle.
"We want everybody with a cell phone or regular digital camera to be able to capture 3-D objects," says Eric Stollnitz, one of the Microsoft researchers who worked on the project. (((Great news for fabrication pirates.)))
To capture a car in 3-D, for example, a person needs to take a handful of photos from different viewpoints around it. The photos can be instantly sent to a cloud server for processing. The app then downloads a photo-realistic model of the object that can be smoothly navigated by sliding a finger over the screen. A detailed 360 degree view of a car-sized object needs around 40 photos, a smaller object like a birthday cake would need 25 or fewer.
If captured with a conventional camera instead of a cell phone, the photos have to be uploaded onto a computer for processing in order to view the results. The researchers have also developed a Web browser plug-in that can be used to view the 3-D models, enabling them to be shared online. "You could be selling an item online, taking a picture of a friend for fun, or recording something for insurance purposes," says Stollnitz. "These 3-D scans take up less bandwidth than a video because they are based on only a few images, and are also interactive."
To make a model from the initial snapshots, the software first compares the photos to work out where in 3-D space they were taken from. The same technology was used in a previous Microsoft research project, PhotoSynth, that gave a sense of a 3-D scene by jumping between different views (see video)....
