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.