Commoditization of Car-Mounted Immersive Imagery September 24, 2009
Posted by Mok Oh in Acquisition, Cameras.Tags: 2.5D, Acquisition, car-mounted, fisheye, panorama, Photography
2 comments
PixKorea Car. They use digital SLRs with fisheye lenses. The mechanical rig can change heights. Cool.
Sorry it’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy with family, work, my dog ate my home work, had to wash my hair…
I was invited to give a talk at a conference in Seoul, Korea called National Spatial Data Infrastructure Expo 2009 (Sep. 9-11). I spoke about “How to Paint the World,” which stressed on the importance of a framework for capturing, processing, storing and distributing photorealistic, immersive, interactive content of our world for various applications (e.g. local search). Ok, that sounded fancier than it actually was (or perhaps more boring than it was?).
But that isn’t the gist of this blog. I wanted to write about how pleasantly surprised I was to see so many street-level, car-mounted camera aquisition systems in the show floor of the expo. I think I saw at least 5 companies doing that when I walked around half the show floor, with various configs and cameras.
This car uses Point Grey's Lady Bug (red on top) as well as digital SLRs on the bottom. Not exactly sure why.
This car uses Point Grey's Lady Bug and two GPS's to determine orientation. When asked how well that worked, the answer was ambiguous.
In general, I am seeing a bunch of companies being formed that have a car-mounted system for street-level panoramic acquisition around the world. I’m glad to see this, since it feels like another step towards this content type being useful and in demand. But ultimately, street content will be commoditized (even before it can be monetized — but that’s whole other topic).
So, what does this mean? Well, it means the consumers win in the long run. It also means that the competition will hopefully improve the image quality of this exterior content (really lead by Google Street View). Further differentiation and innovation needed to win in the competitive market will push the innovative minds to do a lot more than just display panoramas — enabling mashups, UGCs, improving extensibility and maintainability, encoding a whole lot more geo info, getting INTERIORS (a-hem!) etc. will be necessary for survival. As I said, this should all be good for the consumers, if it pans out this way. Yay.
It’s still a bit early to tell who, how, what will win or lose. And somewhat surprisingly (to a US-centric person), Google is not winning else where around the world. Yay.
Panoramas vs. 3D (Part 1): Introduction August 16, 2009
Posted by Mok Oh in 2.5D, 3D, Photography, mirror worlds, panorama.Tags: 3D, 2.5D, EveryScape, panoramas, Google Earth, Microsoft Bing
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Google Earth St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, NY, at a "bird's eye" view.
Wade Roush made a great comment in Panoramas vs. Photosynth Part 4, not to forget that there are forces in 3D happening as well. This blog is inspired by Wade. Thanks, Wade!
Now, imagine an online web representation of our world in 3D… You type in maps.bing.com to get to a place you are interested in. You find a map, and you zoom down close to see the street. Then you click on the “3D” viewing mode. You zoom in some more. Then you land on the street… a photorealistic, real-time 3D street. You can smoothly walk around, not just in the streets but on the side walk as well. Hell, you can fly if you wanted to. You find the store you like, and you navigate inside. When you do, you are greeted by the store owner avatar saying hello. And it’s actually a person behind the avatar. You ask your questions about the store, if they have what you are looking for. You walk around to browse what they have. Then you walk out and zoom to your favorite restaurant to see how crowded the place really is currently… And cut. (Or wake up.)
I think this scenario, or something similar, has a real possibility in the future. Assuming this can happen, then the question is, how far off are we? It feels to me at least a decade away. Most likely more.
Now let’s get back to reality and talk about what we have today. We have Google Earth and Microsoft Bing that have a 3D representation of our world. There are wonderful other technologies, like C3 Technologies, but they have not yet proven to be scalable (by “proven,” I mean published and has significant coverage). It really is amazing to see cities like New York in full 3D glory, BUT from a “bird’s eye” view. At a thousand feet above ground, these cities look amazingly real.
At a ground level, not so much. (See below for a comparison.)
Photograph of St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, NY
Google Earth St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, NY
So, another relevant question is: What is it going to take to create a believable 3D on the web at the ground level? I think quite a bit. (To be discussed in the following blogs.)
At a bird’s eye point of view, the level of detail required to make a person believe what she’s seeing is “real” is much less so than at a ground level. Up there, the buildings are more or less boxes with photo textures. (Don’t get me wrong — the feat accomplished by Google Earth and Microsoft Bing are incredible.) But at a ground level, I would argue that there is an order of magnitude more 3D shit you gotta model to convince people that you are actually at 43rd and 5th in New York City, or Time Square or Champs Elysees. You have all the street level things that require to be represented realistically — people, cars, trees, news stands, lamp posts, signs, etc. All these have to be there just like they are in real life to convince folks that they’re really there.
So, for the foreseeable future, we have panoramas and UGC photographs to represent our real world, aka mirror world, a la Google Street View and EveryScape. These are what I call 2.5D representations, since they are not quite 3D, but more than 2D.
This series of my blog sounds like fun to write. Want more? Please let me know.
2D, 3D… 2.5D?? July 8, 2009
Posted by Mok Oh in panorama.Tags: 2.5D, 2D, 3D, Earthmine, ETech, EveryScape, extrinsics, Google, intrinics, Mapjack, web
13 comments
EveryScape's "2.5D" Local Business Webscape Demo
When I say “2D,” people understand. When I say “3D,” folks get that too. But when I say “2.5D,” I either get a “huh?” or a “hm..” Yes, dimensions are typically in integers, so it’s a fuzzy description for sure. When I say 2.5D, I mean visual representations that look almost 3D but not quite. More specifically, in my context, I mean connected series of immersive panoramas.
Ok, some nerdy stuff (but don’t fall asleep). Typically, 3D in our context means three orthogonal axes in space, let’s call them X, Y, and Z — hence, the 3 dimensions. When a first-person or a camera or a viewer is involved, we need to add a couple more dimensions Phi and Theta for looking up-down and side-to-side. So position (x, y, and z) and some viewing direction (phi, theta) consist of 5 dimensions (also called the extrinsics). Yes, there’s something called the intrinsics as well, but that’s for some other discussion — it just means what type of camera and lens you’re using.
So, what’s my point? My point is 2.5D really is just a figure of speech. But more interestingly, I think that 2.5D way of representing our world in a digital fashion is really useful.
I gave a talk at an O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference early this year titled “2D, 3D… 2.5D?” The abstract was as follows:
“Historically, 3D on the Web has always been associated with difficulties. Although 3D has been around for decades, from research labs to gaming to visualization of a 3D earth, there are numerous reasons why 3D is still having majority adoption challenges. On the other hand, digital photography (and video) have blossomed well into the world-wide consumer market, from both hardware (e.g., cell phones with cameras) and software perspectives (e.g., Flickr, YouTube).
In this talk we delve deeper into the benefits of a “2.5D” representation of our world, leveraging both 2D photography and 3D graphics and vision techniques. We open up a discussion for why such difficulties in 3D realm exist, what/how we can benefit from digital point-and-shoot photography, and further discuss the benefits of creating a “2.5D” representation—more specifically from the mirror world and web perspective (e.g., Amazon A9, Google Street View, EveryScape).
We will discuss the pros/cons of 3D using specific examples (e.g. Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth, Sketchup, Maya, etc.), 2D (e.g. digital photography, photoshop, jpeg, flickr, etc.), and 2.5D (e.g. EveryScape, Google Street View, MS Photosynth). Below is a table where we compare the each of the 3D, 2.5D, and 2D with some parameters, in which we argue all must be in the “easy” category for mass adoption success. Mass adoption of 3D may be years (or even decades) away, and various 2.5D solutions are filling in some of the needs now. We further discuss EveryScape’s specific journey in research and development—how and why we ended up where we are today.”
The point is that while scalable 3D isn’t quite here yet for the web and mass adoption, 2.5D technologies are filling in the gap (e.g. EveryScape, Google Street View, Earthmine, Mapjack). They are emerging indeed!
If there’s enough interest, I will put up my slides. Pls let me know.
