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Laura Foy: Hey, everybody! TechFest 2011 and in continuing... continuing with our theme
of, ah, exciting things happening for your phone, uh, I found Johannes who is going to
show us 3D scanning done with just a regular phone, right?
Johannes Kopf: Yeah, it's a phone or a regular point and shoot camera. So, the way this works
is you just take your camera, you walk around an object, and take casually a few pictures,
and then our software does the rest for you. It turns them into a beautiful and photo-realistic
3D model.
Laura Foy: So, it sounds similar to Photosynth, a technology I'm sure that you guys are familiar
with... (Indicating the audience while saying this) ...where you sort of take the photos
from all different areas of a room and, uh, and it synths them together?
Johannes Kopf: Yeah, so this is, uh, kind of taking that technology one step further.
It builds up on the same technology, but, um, in contrast to Photosynth they're full
3D models and the navigation is much simpler. So, I can just show this to you on this screen...
Laura Foy: Yeah! Yeah, go ahead!
Johannes Kopf: Um, uh, this is, um, Rick's car and we just, you know, walked around it
and took a few photos and this is the result. You see this model; you can spin it around
on the screen and it has a very intuitive interface.
Laura Foy: Wow!
Johannes Kopf: And now, what's cool about this technology is that we can not only do
this on a desktop. We can also embed it in a webpage, just as you would with a, you know,
video right now.
Laura Foy: Right. That's amazing!
Johannes Kopf: Yeah.
Laura Foy: And it's so fluid! So, how many photos would you guess were taken to, uh,
sort of give this sort of really accurate spin here?
Johannes Kopf: It's about forty pictures.
Laura Foy: That's it?
Johannes Kopf: And it took about two minutes or so to take them.
Laura Foy: Wow!
Johannes Kopf: Um, I can show you an... a few other datasets as well.
Laura Foy: Sure!
Johannes Kopf: So, um, this is a nice one.
Laura Foy: Here we go!
Johannes Kopf: So, if, you know, you think about, you know, selling an object online
or something, you could use this technology and it's much more interesting than just a
boring photo on the webpages.
Laura Foy: Yeah, now I've noticed it just kinda’ goes left to right. Can you also have
it go up and down?
Johannes Kopf: Yeah, so we're working on that right now. Uh, in this demo we can't. Right
now, it's always just a ring around the object, but we're working on enabling, you know, going
up and down as well.
Laura Foy: That's awesome! And you said this can be done, um, with any camera. So you could
just be out with your cell phone, then take a bunch of pictures with your cell phone,
and then what would you do? Upload them into this application?
Johannes Kopf: Yes, so it runs on the cloud. And, um, all you have to do is take the photos,
press a button [Go], and then you wait one or two minutes, and then you can view it on
your phone. And we have a demo for this here, so we can show this to you as well.
Laura Foy: Good! Let's take a look at that! Sudipta, are you going to show us the phone
demo?
Sudipta Sinha: So, I'm first going to show you the same content that you can now look
at. Ah... This is basically the same dataset (about, uh, ten images of the guitar) and
I can do the nice, ah, streaming, ah, viewing on the phone.
Sudipta Sinha: And this is really nice for, you know, you need to get your own car and
so this was a tiny dataset which we have of, again, about, a semicircle going around the
car. And so these are the original images that are now being, sort of, downloaded from
the server
Laura Foy: Uh huh!
Sudipta Sinha: ...and just in a few seconds I can show you the... the little spin movie.
Uh, so... so now, now we can do a little spin.
Laura Foy: Wow!
Sudipta Sinha: Again, you see, you see the 3D effect - the background moving differently
from the foreground.
Laura Foy: That's so cool! Look at how the tree even moves! This is amazing!
Sudipta Sinha: Yeah. And so, so we, we think this is really cool for you can even do larger
objects, there are some examples of, or you can do a full 360 walk-around of your house.
Laura Foy: Mmhmm!
Sudipta Sinha: And as you just said, uh, for now we are limiting it to a ring, but there's
no reason why we couldn't do thi... take more photos and have more coverage...
Laura Foy: Yeah!
Sudipta Sinha: ...letting you sort of do a full hemisphere around an object.
Laura Foy: That's awesome! And now, he mentioned something about, om, ah, putting it on a webpage.
Right now, how, how would that be done? Is it... It's obviously not a JPG. How would
you put it on a webpage?
Sudipta Sinha: It's basically using the latest... Ah, so there's a lot of new technologies coming
out which, ah, enable you with... enable you to do 3D graphics in the browser.
Laura Foy: Mmhmm.
Sudipta Sinha: And so the type of gra... 3D graphics we are doing here is basically something
that is fairly lightweight and should run on a large number of computers without requiring
lots of...
Laura Foy: Really.
Sudipta Sinha: ...3D graphics hardware.
Laura Foy: Great!
Sudipta Sinha: So this is something that we hope to see pretty soon in...
Laura Foy: Yeah, so pretty soon, and, ideally, I would think that we would all be able to
do! So, like he said, you could take photos of something that you want to sell, put it
on Craig's List. It's not just for, um, developers or website designers; just everybody could
do it!
Sudipta Sinha: That's right. Yes.
Laura Foy: Great! And, and... whe... whe... when?! When can we do it?! (Laughing)
Sudipta Sinha: When... We are working on this. The, the technology seems, uh, to be getting
close to, to a point where we can, we can deliver this.
But, so TechFest is basically around - we are kind of showing the technology and we
are hoping to push forward on these things to get it out there.
Laura Foy: That's the thing about this! I come to this every year and I see all this
great stuff and I'm like, "When can I have it?!" "Soon.". (laughs)
Sudipta Sinha: So, uh, if you're interested, uh, I could also do a live demo. So the idea
is that this is sort of our pro..., uh, little, uh, prop...
Laura Foy: Yeah! Let's do it!
Sudipta Sinha: ...and we can do a little capture and, uh...
Laura Foy: Let's do it. Do you want to use your camera, or do you want to use the phone?
Sudipta Sinha: The way I'm going to do the demo now is that this is a standard point
and shoot camera...
Laura Foy: Yeah.
Sudipta Sinha: ...but it has an Eye-Fi card in it. It'll automatically transfer the pictures
from the camera to the computer...
Laura Foy: Sure!
Sudipta Sinha: ...so I don't have to physically plug it in. But this is sort of the model
in which this would work. Like that could basically be the cloud and this could be your
cell phone camera. Laura Foy: Okay!
Sudipta Sinha: And so, let me, let me start...
Laura Foy: Go ahead; take some photos of Mr. Fuzzy, over there. And you said you were going
to take about, uh, maybe twenty or so?
Sudipta Sinha: I'm going to take, yeah, about, maybe, um, a dozen images because I'm not
going around...
Laura Foy: Okay.
Sudipta Sinha: ...the object.
Laura Foy: Alright, so now we're over here and look at this! Here we go! Instantly...
there he is! And this was done in, you saw, maybe 30 seconds, 12 photos, and a 3D Mr.
Fuzzy! Absolutely awesome. Thanks, guys!