CMU School of Drama


Friday, March 25, 2011

3-D Models Created by a Cell Phone

Technology Review: "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.

4 comments:

James Southworth said...

This already exists on mobile phones with projects like the I-Phone App Trimensional. The new sprint EVO 3D has two side by side 5 MP camera's which I'm sure will carry this even farther. In terms of a concept, this is a port of existing software to mobiles.

It's kind of neat to think that in the future you can take a picture of something and send someone a 3d model of it. I like the Idea for troubleshooting problems on the road. You can use facetime and 3D models to communicate back with your shop about whats going on and work through a hard problem.

JaredGerbig said...

this is just showing how much technology has progressed and portability of the technology is one of the biggest parts. i have cad on my i phone - it's an i phone app i bought for 3.99 and it isn't the most useful thing in the world but the ability to draft on your phone is just fascinating to me and many designers who may never actually use the app but love the idea that they can. at the end of the day you should probably be asking "is this all really necessary?" and i promise you the answer really is "NO" but people especially those technologically savvy really dig these bits of technology even if they aren't all that useful in the field.

Nic Marlton said...

So cool! Jackson told me about a project in which a person wearing all white was submerged very slowly into a pool of black water. as they sank the water surrounded them, and very slowly with a hand held webcam recorded a three dimensional image. it is wonderful, and inspiring, and exhilarating to hear about people in our world working on projects like this. this is the wave of the future, and i could not be more excited. this is a beautiful example of an interesting practical technology becoming easily available to a wide variety of people.

ZoeW said...

This is really cool. This software seems to be completely applicable for anyone that is working in a design field. You could take around 30 pictures of your model box and then instantly have a 3D replica on your computer or if you need to show the specs of a prop and you just can’t convey it any other way then by showing it to someone but now you can do it without leaving the store. This is really cool technology, the article was really confusing at first because I thought that it was saying that you could take pictures from your cell phone and then a 3D printer would print them, but that is not what it is saying at all. When that happens I will be thoroughly impressed.