3D Rome Was Built in a Day

Com­put­er sci­en­tists at UNC-Chapel Hill and col­leagues at the Swiss uni­ver­si­ty, ETH-Zurich, have cre­at­ed an algo­rithm that search­es through mil­lions of pho­tos on Flickr, then uses them to build a 3D mod­el of land­marks and geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions. Case in point, the video above. Accord­ing to The Dai­ly Tar Heel, “researchers demon­strat­ed the tech­nique by using 3 mil­lion images of Rome to recon­struct the city’s pri­ma­ry land­marks. A sin­gle PC processed the images in less than 24 hours. Land­marks in Berlin were recon­struct­ed in the same man­ner.” Not bad for a day’s work…

via Read­WriteWeb