Posts Tagged ‘Flickr’
30
Apr
2010
Urban Hackscapes: Augmented Reality 1.0
iPhone vs. pencil, or what the Library of Congress has to do with cartoon dinosaurs.
If you think augmented reality is a recent fascination woven from the fabric of the camera phone age, think again — artists, photographers and casual creative pranksters have long been using camera tricks to hack urban landscape by layering additional fascination over the naked eye’s view of the city. Here are three of our favorite photographic hackscapes.
SOUVENIRS
You recall Michael Hughes‘ wonderful Souvenirs collection from pickings past. The British photographer travels the world and “replaces” some of its most iconic landmarks with their cheap touristy souvenir replicas — miniatures, snow globes, plates, postcards — by holding them in front of the camera at just the right angle.
The result is a playful take on tourism which, depending on how philosophically inclined you are, even exudes subtle commentary on the artificiality of souvenir collecting in the context of the actual experience and our often excessive propensity for sentimentality.
Prints from the project are available on Hughes’ website.
LOOKING INTO THE PAST
Because we love the cross-pollination of ideas and the transference of creative inspiration, we love Jason Powell’s Looking Into The Past project (which you may remember from one of our most popular features of all time, Photographic Time Machine), inspired by Hughes’ Souvenirs.
Powell prints out historical photographs from The Library of Congress digital archive (remember that, too?) and holds them up against the physical locations depicted in them, offering an absolutely fascinating glimpse of how urban landscape, dress and transportation have evolved over the past couple of centuries.
To contribute to this fold in the space-time continuum, submit your own photographic time capsules to the eponymous Flickr pool Powell set up for the project.
PENCIL VS. CAMERA
After object-in-photo and photo-in-photo, it’s only fitting that someone comes up with drawing-in-photo. Artist Benjamin Heine did — his series Pencil vs. Camera adds an element of playful fantasy to the already innovative cross-medium technique.
We imagine being trampled by cartoon Godzilla while staring at a four-eyed cat is among the eeriest yet most amusing of deaths.
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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.
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