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[andrewducker]

Amazing project to recreate 3D scenes from single images.  Examples here

Comments

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Hello Esper machine!

Very clever, but not much use

[akicif.livejournal.com]

It's not that as amazing as all that. More than twenty years ago people were using similar techniques (albeit with less computer power to chuck at it), and one application was to try and derive 3-d molecular structures from 2-d projections, using prior knowledge of chemical structure (bonds, angles, molecular interactions).

The whole thing was abandoned because there wasn't a way of getting new knowledge out of it that wasn't in the original projection (for an example in this case, see the top storey windows in the Merton mpeg: they're free-standing, not connected to the rest of the college), or that contradicted the rule set (one of my crystal structures turned out to have a trans amide linkage in an eight-membered ring, not previously known to be possible).

It soon became apparent that more accurate 3-d information could be gained by having two cameras and fairly simple software, than by using one camera and software containing a truly massive number of assumptions, and with the crash in price of digital cameras over the intervening couple of decades, I'd suspect that this is now even more the case.

Not quite the same thing, but have you seen the "stereo" animated gifs that work by flicking between left-eye and right-eye views, so the object appears to wobble?