Photo Friday: Easily Convert Images into 3D.

This week’s photo Friday is minus the photo. I’ve been lazy this week due to my bout of pneumonia, and haven’t gone anywhere interesting at all. So here’s a quick introduction to a really useful and fun tool I found recently. It’s called Make 3D, and it’s a fairly powerful 3D image creation program that the fine folks at Stanford University have come up with.

The really great thing is that it means you no longer need to download a gigantic, all too complicated program onto your computer to make 3D graphics. You can use it online here, as it operates just like Flickr and similar photo sharing websites.

I’ve just used it to create a series of landscape images of various Australian places for my relatives overseas. They’ve turned out very well, considering all one need do is upload the photo and the computer does the rest. There are options to modify the 3D image afterwards for the more technically minded amongst us, that is. For everybody else it’s just a case of sitting back and reaping the rewards.

You download a small plug-in for your browser, and you’re all set to go to view the images in 3D.

You can pan, fly around the image, walk through it – and a bunch of other options to play with. I found you’re better off going through an image slowly so that your processor has time to fully render the image as you go. There’s very little lag time though, which is what really sold me.

The only downside to it is that it doesn’t yet work very well with images that include people, especially close-ups. The lines aren’t delineated carefully enough for the software to be able to process a face easily.

You know, it’s funny how some things our brains do with such ease, like recognise a face, can be so difficult to replicate on a computer. You may have a lot of raw processing power available these days, and you can have the fanciest graphics card in the world but it still doesn’t make the puzzle any simpler. We’re complicated creatures, maybe even more complicated than we realise.