Posts Tagged ‘Flickr’
31
Jul
2009
Crowdsourced 3D Cities
Reconstructing Rome, or what 496 computer cores and an autistic savant have in common.
Crowdsourcing has clearly been the cultural darling of late. And while some of its most successful applications, from Wikipedia to reCAPTCHA, rely on “active crowdsourcing” — building the collective product by actively soliciting user input — others are starting to work wonders with “passive crowdsourcing,” using user-contributed content that is already available on the web.
Building Rome in a Day, a new project out of the University of Washington GRAIL lab, does just that, using 150,000 Flickr images tagged “Rome” to reconstruct the iconic city in 3D. Because tourist photos are taken from a multitude of vantage points, stitching them together into a cohesive 3D image creates rich and spatially accurate models.
The Rome project, which took 21 hours on a cluster of 496 computer cores, reconstructed some of the city’s most famous landmarks — the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Cathedral, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon.
The team has also begun reconstructing other cities — Venice, which took 250,000 images and 65 hours, and Dubrovnik, at a more modest 57,845 photos and 22.5 hours.
The ongoing project has fascinating applications in reconstructing not only static landscapes, but also dynamic events as they unfold — in the era of citizen journalism, imagine using public images of anything from natural disasters (like the 2005 Indonesian tsunami) to political protests (like the recent unrest in Iran) to create an accurate record of history.
Or, you can always have a genius autistic savant fly over in a helicopter and draw frighteningly accurate panoramas on a 16-foot canvas.
03
Jul
2009
Illustration Spotlight: Plan 9.001
The 1’s and 0’s of home, or what the Olsen twins have to do with John Locke and God.
Every once in a while we stumble across something we don’t quite get, but can tell is brilliant. Case in point: The Plan 9.001 Flickr set from an artist by the cryptic name of 9000.
Full of wondrous, beautifully art directed charts, graphs, diagrams and other fascinations that capture the human condition, the illustrations are part poetry, part art direction, part homage to geek culture — and all genius.
Most of the images are left to exist in their self-contained reality, with no caption or explanation, inviting you to make sense of them ever which way you wish.
And some are brimming with keen cultural commentary, oozing both from the images themselves and from the quotes accompanying — mismatched at first glance, like this odd psalm that we had to Google-translate, but deeply profound in context.
Indeed, there’s a certain preoccupation with the God — a quest for divinity in the godless, lonesome, conflicted world the artist seems to inhabit. Or, you know, it’s just a mockery thereof.
And while we’re not quite sure what to make of it it all, we urge you to explore the Plan 9.001 set and the rest of 9000’s rather diverse but uniformly bizarre body of work — if for no other reason than that it has intrigued us more than anything we’ve come across in a long, long time.
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