create 3D virtual tour from many tourist pics

[Admin]

Not exactly robots, but still pretty cool. Basically a large quantity of tourist photos from the web are recombined in software to create a 3D virtual tour.

More info here:
http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/
http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/findingpaths/
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

[youtube]gLLzV5qeKyk[/youtube]

[paulstreats]

An amazing example of recognising a predefined 3d object using 2d pictures. Brilliant 

[ddemarco5]

wow, now that musta taken a while to program, amazing.

[Asellith]

Could you couple this with a video navigation system to map a room with nothing but a mobile robot and a web cam? Obviously the robot would not be doing the processing but a standalone computer connected with wifi could download the pictures and auto update the environment around the robot. They are creating a 3d environment so why not add a frame of reference and calculate distance?