Creating Virtual City Tours Through 'Photo Tourism'

By combing through images on Flickr, a team of researchers has created a 3-D model of the city of Rome constructed from 150,000 tourist snapshots.

1 minute read

September 19, 2009, 7:00 AM PDT

By Nate Berg


"A team from the University of Washington (UW) has developed a new computer algorithm that uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day. It's thought that one use for the technology could be to provide visitors with an on-line virtual-reality 3-D tour of cities they visit.

UW has been studying ways of utilizing the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing websites like Flickr. The digital Rome was built from 150,000 tourist photos tagged on that site with the word ‘Rome' or ‘Roma' (there are around 2 million ‘Rome/Roma' images on the site)."

Within just 21 hours, the algorithm was able to compile the images to create a 3-D photoreal model of the city. The researchers say they'll be able to model any city with large amounts of photos and essentially create virtual tours.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009 in Gizmag

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