The "hot sexx0r" photo browser
It's SIGGRAPH time again, so that means that the really cool photo browsing technology that CSE and MS have developed can finally be revealed to the public!
The basic idea is that you use some computer vision techniques to determine precisely where a given photograph was taken. Once you have a collection of photographs in the same general area and their locations, you can browse the various photos in 3D space, zoom in and out, find similar images, etc.
I highly encourage you to check out the long video and demo applet at http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/, and Microsoft's commerialized version, PhotoSynth. It'll blow you away.
GRAIL has some other interesting SIGGRAPH publications this year. Two in particular are Continuum Crowds and Schematic Storyboarding.
Continuum Crowds allows you to generate insanely large crowds of people/entities efficiently. We tested the technology in a game environment last summer ( Widget Baron... still a work in progress), and now EA has licensed it for use in some of the future games. If you check out the video, you can clearly see how this might be used in games.
Schematic Storyboarding is a system that semi-automatically generates storyboard frames from video clips, and lets you edit video by interacting with the storyboard frames.
Also, as it turns out, Comic Chat was also a research project partially developed by UW CSE, and look how it's come. (NSFW)
The basic idea is that you use some computer vision techniques to determine precisely where a given photograph was taken. Once you have a collection of photographs in the same general area and their locations, you can browse the various photos in 3D space, zoom in and out, find similar images, etc.
I highly encourage you to check out the long video and demo applet at http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/, and Microsoft's commerialized version, PhotoSynth. It'll blow you away.
GRAIL has some other interesting SIGGRAPH publications this year. Two in particular are Continuum Crowds and Schematic Storyboarding.
Continuum Crowds allows you to generate insanely large crowds of people/entities efficiently. We tested the technology in a game environment last summer ( Widget Baron... still a work in progress), and now EA has licensed it for use in some of the future games. If you check out the video, you can clearly see how this might be used in games.
Schematic Storyboarding is a system that semi-automatically generates storyboard frames from video clips, and lets you edit video by interacting with the storyboard frames.
Also, as it turns out, Comic Chat was also a research project partially developed by UW CSE, and look how it's come. (NSFW)