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MILES O'BRIEN: Who says Rome wasn't built in a day?
With the muscle of about 500 computers and 150 thousand still images, Steve Seitz
and his colleagues at the University of Washington Seattle Campus reconstructed many of Rome's
famous landmarks in just 21 hours.
STEVE SEITZ: The idea behind Rome in a day is that we wanted to see how big of a city or
model we can build from photos on the Internet.
MILES O'BRIEN: With support from the National Science Foundation, they're rebuilding Rome
pixel by pixel, instead of brick by brick. Calculations that once took months, now take hours.
MALE: This is the largest 3D reconstruction that anyone has ever tried. It's completely
organic, it works just from any image that people upload the photos and they suddenly appear
in our models.
MILES O'BRIEN: It starts with a trip to the photo sharing site, Flickr, a search for
images of the real thing. Once pictures are identified,
the computer starts the process of making 3D objects from 2D stills.
SAMEER AGARWAL: If I'm a sculpture, there are three photographs of me;
we find three points in those three photographs which point to my nose. From that, we know that
there are three points in these three images which correspond to a single point in the 3D world.
MILES O'BRIEN: Computers map huge clusters of these points into 3D space, creating ghost-like
images called point clouds. Those squares represent the positions of the source photos.
STEVE SEITZ: For buildings, I think we can get accuracy to within, you know, a few
centimeters, we've measured this. And for individual objects that are photographed closer up,
we can potentially do a lot better like, you know, millimeter level accuracy.
MILES O'BRIEN: Finally, color and texture are added. And what you get is a
virtual 3D tour, like this fly through of Dubrovnik Croatia.
STEVE SEITZ: What excites me is the ability to capture the real world, you know,
to be able to reconstruct the experience of being somewhere without actually being there.
MILES O'BRIEN: Look for this next generation technology to show up in online mapping
sites, video games and a whole lot more. It's a virtual guarantee.
For Science Nation, I'm Miles O'Brien.