Looks like Microsoft Research and the PhotoSynth team have been busy. This new demo shows an app that uses a set of photos of an object to create a 3D model of it.
Interestingly in an interview over on MIT’s Technology Review site, it sounds like this is actually a phone app (Windows Phone 7 I’d assume), with photos being uploaded to a cloud service for processing. Whether the result is a full 3D model that can be viewed at an angle, or imported into other apps, I’m not sure. Either way I think this is a fascinating bit of technology, if the ‘viewer’ component is available as a Silverlight (I’m guessing Flash is too much to hope for…) so it can easily be embedded into web pages it would be great for showing objects online – remember those old 3D video clips from the 90’s?
If I were MS I’d get this productised and available as soon as I could… it needs some ‘cool’.