Photo Tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D

"Photo tourism is a system for browsing large collections of photographs in 3D." See the video demonstration of this exciting new experimental computer technology.

" ... a new 3D software technology designed to create an immersive 3D online photo sharing capability ... "

"photo collections into 3D walkthroughs ... a new technology called Photosynth, which can stitch together 2D snapshots of a location to build a 3D walkthrough. So for instance, you could do a Google Image or Flickr search for photos of the Eiffel Tower, dump all the resulting photos of the monument into Photosynth, and have the software recreate it and its surroundings in 3D. ... "

"Photo Tourism is a system for browsing large collections of photographs in 3D. Our approach takes as input large collections of images from either personal photo collections or Internet photo sharing sites, and automatically computes each photo's viewpoint and a sparse 3D model of the scene. Our photo explorer interface enables the viewer to interactively move about the 3D space by seamlessly transitioning between photographs, based on user control."

Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, and Richard Szeliski, Photo Tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D," ACM Transactions on Graphics, 25(3), August 2006.