Stanford computer scientists recently announced that they have invented an algorithm that digitally converts photographs into 3-D representations of their subjects. Furthermore, they seemed to be offering anyone and everyone on the world wide interweb the chance to toy with their new technology at a designated website, located here.
When I first checked out the site yesterday, there was an area for new members to sign in, which of course I clicked on only to discover…the little swirling cursor indicating a server failure and/or pending Firefox crash. (I guess even Stanford scientists have a hard time computing the volume of traffic they might draw with a new photo tool.) Now the site simply says “Sorry, Website is down for maintenance” where the sign-in used to be.
Regardless, they’ve at least been good enough to post a few samples on YouTube, featuring the two dimensional photograph and the resulting three-dimensional representation with a “fly-around” video. It looks a lot like the kind of image generated by a stereograph: impressive, but more like a three-dimensional model made with layers of flat paper than the real thing. Who knows what kinds of uses this algorithm can be put to. I’m sure the Defense Department can think of something…
