[Geowanking] open voxel space and an open photosynth

[Aaron Straup Cope]

"Maybe we could encourage sites like Flickr to add Open Voxel Space 
specific tags!"

What would those tags be exactly and/or could machine tags [1] play them 
on TV ?

[1] http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/

Eric Wolf wrote:
> Anselm,
> 
> This is a fantastic idea!
> 
> I'd like to suggest that a BOINC client be developed so that the heavy 
> processing can be done via volunteer cpu cycles. Micrsoft is already 
> having to deal with the energy consumption issues of the CPU power 
> needed to wide application of photosynth:
> 
> https://mail.google.com/mail/?source=navclient-ff#inbox/11adaf6fc25718df
> 
> A grid, volunteer model would allow for greater breadth of voxel 
> modeling than I think even Microsoft can acheive with dedicated CPUs. 
> Maybe we could encourage sites like Flickr to add Open Voxel Space 
> specific tags!
> 
> -Eric
> 
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Anselm Hook <anselm at gmail.com 
> <mailto:anselm at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I wanted to just share the observation that it might be time for us
>     all as a community to look at building a kind of open photosynth -
>     what could be called an 'open voxel space' map of the planet.
> 
>     Microsoft's photosynth project stitches together a series of
>     arbitrary user photographs of a scene, taken from different angles
>     and perspective and melds into a single seamless 3d image of that
>     setting.  The way this works is that each image has notable feature
>     points on it, and between any two images there may be zero or more
>     shared feature points.  If you have enough similar feature points
>     then you can effectively say that these two images overlap each
>     other in some way.  Given two photographs of a building, say from
>     two people standing at two different places, you can start to
>     re-constitute a 3d voxel model of that building from just those two
>     photographs.
> 
>     The goal would be to start collecting all photographs and building
>     an open 3d model of the photographed planetary surface of earth. 
>     Basically one would be building a kind of open voxel space - a 3d
>     model of our cities and spaces - and this could help with other
>     projects.
> 
>     The algorithms are not hard to use, there are open source
>     implementations (google SIFT) - and even if they algorithms suck
>     right now they will improve over time.  It's mostly just a scaling
>     problem; how and where to aggregate or index or store the images. 
>     In fact I strongly recommend at least playing with one of the open
>     source SIFT implementations - it is a lot of fun and gives you a
>     taste for the possibilities.
> 
>     Generally I feel that the best data is more data.  An Open Voxel
>     Space could help with lots of other problems.  We define and attach
>     labels to streets as a way of doing a kind of manual position
>     sensing.  We of course care to know about streets and paths because
>     we cannot walk through walls.
> 
>     Good voxel data could help fix up bad GPS data among other things...
>     and it would help increase the usability of GPS data therefore and
>     reduce the necessity for thinking about streets and labels.  With
>     enough good data a router would simply pick from the most common
>     recent existing full gps track between the two points...
> 
>     Also (and this is less firm, more speculative, but still seems
>     marginally relevant): maybe a voxel map of space; that wasn't just
>     focusing on labelled streets or paths, but on space in general,
>     might also help with the puzzle of better delivering real time and
>     volatile data to people - "just in time knowlege" - the "help I lost
>     a kitten" kinds of stuff.  It's unclear to me why there isn't really
>     a kind of real-time bartering service yet - perhaps twitter is
>     closest - but one that focuses more on discrete signalling for very
>     specific services; rather than just "saying"... Maybe a better map
>     of space could help - maybe the issue is that "distance" between
>     things is blocked by buildings in a way that street-maps don't quite
>     convey and when that is not clearly factored in it acts as a barrier
>     to surmounting distance?
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> -=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=-
> Eric B. Wolf 720-209-6818
> PhD Student CU-Boulder - Geography
> 
> 
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