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Technology

3-D Search Engine for Shapes 26

Posted by Hemos from the find-the-purty-colors dept.
geoffsmith writes "Just stumbled upon an amazing search engine from Princeton where you can search for shapes. What separates this from something like Google Image Search is the fact that you can actually draw out the shape you are looking for on a little sketchpad. The sketchpad allows you to draw front, side, and top views to provide the search engine with a 3-dimensional construct of the shape."
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3-D Search Engine for Shapes More

3-D Search Engine for Shapes

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  • Damn (Score:2, Funny)

    by I Am The Owl ( 531076 )
    I knew I should've paid more attention in my art class on human body studies!
    • That was my first thought too. Glad I'm not the only mammal.

      You have to wonder what would come up with an hourglass shape, or a pair of circles...

  • I just submitted this story, and it showed up as being posted at 4am. Which would explain why it only has 1 comment, it was posted 1 minute ago and yet it claims to be posted 14 hours ago.

    Anyone who is reading this, contact (Hemos?) and tell them something is wacky with their clock.
    • Obviously this proves that time travel is possible! I've been making a few tests and I think I know how he did it. Expect a formal announcement in a press conference that I'll be giving last week.

      RMN
      ~~~
    • <sarcasm>
      You have to figure Slashdot has been running since 1994. If they moved servers from an area that observed Daylight savings time to one that did not they would have to adjust their clock to make up for all of the springing forward and falling back they missed out on. By my calculation this equates to roughly the 14hours your posting was in Limbo.
      </sarcasm>
    • This is pretty common on Slashdot. With slash, an editor can publish a story to appear with any arbitrary time for the article. If the time is in the future, the article won't appear for a while. If it is in the past, it will appear down the line in the submissions. Whenever it happens, people get mad.
  • The damn thing doesn't work. I am an artist of reasonable skill (see? [pobox.com]) and so tried it out. I attempted the following:

    1. A hand with index finger extended.
    2. An upright pyramid.
    3. A cylinder.
    4. A sphere.
    5. A skull.

    I also put the obvious thing into the text field. It failed to find any match for any of these. The hand and skull, I understand. Missing the pyramid was disappointing, but not matching either the cylinder or sphere?!?! Forget it -- this thing is garbage.
  • ...I am sure there are lots of pornographic websites trying to get this perfected also. Imagine the searches... :)
  • hmmm... i might have to find out
  • I believe that MPEG 7 includes support for encoding of shapes and regions, and would support searches for items by characteristics. If true, that could make searching image databases really nice.
  • Seriously, though, as a (budding) industrial designer, I've always wanted something like this. For example, Philippe Starck's "Prince AHA" stool/stand [dwr.com] is pretty easy to draw, but rather hard to describe using words- "it's sort of a half-and-half stepped-pyramid, organic wineglass shape..."

    I can also imagine the possibilities for wildlife categorization. Say a naturalist had a PDA with this engine on it, as well as a database of plants and/or birds- no more second-guessing encyclopedias.

    Now they just have to have a music search engine where you can hum a few notes from a song, and the possibilities list gets smaller and smaller with each note.

  • One of the authors (one Alex Halderman [slashdot.org]) says that it's (big surprise) not really ready for this kind of load, and that it therefore probably won't work well if at all for most people. Of course, since it appeared 1/2 way down the page, chances are it won't get too badly hammered.

    Anyway, my search for a cube seemed to work pretty well. A sphere seemed to get me a lot of human heads, but my circles were hardly perfect...
  • There are no naked chicks in the data base of 3 dimensional shapes that Stanford has in its data base. I looked it up using every illustration and word combination that I could think of to no avail. There search engine works surprisingly well it's just that the library of shapes searched is limited. I can see this being a lot more impressive of the library of shapes was bigger.
  • You draw the three views T,S,F and the engine returns .... whatever it feels like it.

    I drew a cylinder Circle, rect, rect, and got a locomotive engine (close), a tri-cycle (!!!), a couch (!!!), a bullet (close), a philipps radio (!!!)

    These were repeated several times over too.

    Looks like it still needs a bit more work
  • "We don't do a new version to fix bugs." - Bill Gates
    "The new version - it's not there to fix bugs." - Bill Gates
    -- Retranslated from Focus 43/1995, pp. 206-212

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

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