3D Aerial Photos For the Common Man 78
An anonymous reader writes "So you have a RC model aircraft snapping digital photos from the air, but how do you organize them all? This cheap cloud service from a European research giant will upload your photos and automatically convert them into 3D models you can navigate like a video game. And if you don't have a model aircraft, they got those on-the-cheap too. Let the overhead droning begin!"
If you want to do this, do it now (Score:3, Insightful)
This is so going to be made illegal when more people start taking high resolution pictures of their neighbors' swimming pools.
I say it all the time, Vision to 3d world = AI (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd reason that wiring up Natural Language when having a large database of objects(nouns) would still be rather difficult, but not as difficult as changing camera feeds into 3d world representation.
Finally you need to build a body for the robot, so it can do things in the world. By understanding Natural Language, anyone can tell a robot what to do in their native tongue. Also translation is more effective because the AI can think about sentences and know which word you mean when the word has two meanings.
Sorry, every time I see these technologies that turn camera images into 3d worlds, I can't help but think about Artificial Intelligence. I'm a pretty good programmer, but that is just one piece of software I didn't want to develop myself. I kinda put off actually making Artificial Intelligence in 2002 until someone makes a nice piece of software that you can walk around buildings and turn them into Quake levels.
And in the process of waiting for this software, I theorized the biggest use of AI might be to teach people. Eventually I realized, you don't actually need AI to teach people with computer, all you need is digitize books, make some videos and do some other tutorial software. So if I ever get enough money to buy rights to books, or enough money to live off of, I'm going to try and see this vision through. You gotta realize 200$ for a laptop is cheaper than thousands of dollars of books, and software can take the place of a teacher, so education is gonna be cheap enough that even people in poor countries will have access to it. The only limiting factor is getting the rights to books, and writing some tutorial software. It is a high cost to do this, but once it is done, the benefits for society are several orders of magnitude greater.
The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
>"I kinda put off actually making Artificial Intelligence in 2002 until someone makes a nice piece of software that you can walk around buildings and turn them into Quake levels."
No you didn't. Hey, I put off flapping my arms and flying to the moon in 2002, because there wasn't a decent hotel there. Or maybe I'm talking shit. Certainly that's what I assume you are doing.
You "put it off" because neither you nor anyone else actually knows how to do it.
Re:If you want to do this, do it now (Score:3, Insightful)
Even worse, the so-called "hobbyist" could use the data to make a 3-D video game about bombing government buildings or raping kids and release it under that Marxist GPL license, which would inflame tensions in the Middle East and provoke Iran into destroying Israel.
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I can see why AI research doesn't pay your bills.