A3DianaTamabayevaDanDelany

A3DianaTamabayevaDanDelany

To Do

• please work as a group (minimum: 2 members; max: 6 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)
• identify one focused topic within the chapter which is of greatest interest to your group!
• each group member: should identify one additional source relevant to the topic chosen!
• each group: provide a two page max summary statement in our course environment (mention the additional resources identified)
• prepare a short presentation to the class for the class meeting on Sept 17! the groups can choose how to present their results (oral only; use slides; one member, several members, or all members); time allocation (will be dependent of the numbers of groups: but somewhere between 4 and 10 minutes)

Form for your response

1. Herbert Simon

Diana Tamabayeva, Daniel Delany

2. Most interesting idea/concept you learned from the article?

Good work! I missed a little more informatioen about how your summary and your references relate to or are connected with Shneiderman's writing.

One section of Shneiderman's Chapter 5 addressed visual information, especially photographs. Since the advent of digital photography, it has become easy to put all of our photos on computers for easy browsing and navigation. Additionally, metadata can be added to photographs, allowing for easy organization, cross-referencing and searching, as long as one is willing to put in the time and effort to add such data. For example, images which have date metadata can be shown in chronological order, and those which are tagged with the names of the people and places in the photographs can be searched and catalogued accordingly. However, at the end of the day, photographs attempt to replicate the visual experience one has in a particular physical place, allowing us to recall the memories and thoughts associated with it. Several new technologies have been introduced in the past decade which facilitate this "sense of place" in previously unimagined ways.

Part of the inherent problem with photographs is that they are only 2-dimensional views of a 3-dimensional world. However, #bubblec("recent work at Carnegie Mellon University has made large strides toward changing this", "It is always a good idea to place the reference right where you use it. The reader should not have to look through all references/sources to find the ones they need"): researchers have found a way, using "geometric context" to assume the geometric properties of objects in a photograph and interpolate their 3-dimensional characteristics. Of course, this method cannot "see" objects which are behind objects in the photograph. However, demonstrations have shown this method to be an accurate method, in many situations, for guessing the 3D properties of a scene. This is an interesting breakthrough, (especially if new forms of 3D viewing devices are also developed to display the data) and one which could be applied to future photo browsing applications to help instill a sense of location in those viewing the image.

Additionally, Microsoft's Live Labs (the research division of Microsoft) has recently announced an application called Photosynth. This application also attempts to recreate a 3-dimensional scene, but with an entirely different approach: given a large set of similar images taken near each other, Photosynth automatically identifies similarities in the images and "stitches" them together in a 3D environment. More than a glorified "panorama-maker," Photosynth places the photographs at the point in space where it determines the photo was taken, then allows the user to explore the 3D model that the set of photos collectively create. This allows a user to browse images that were all taken in the same place, and maintain a sense of how the location and angle of one photograph relates to the location and angle of the next. The result is a stunning demonstration of how a group of photographs which themselves are disconnected and disparate can truly give the viewer a sense for the size, shape and subjective feel of a physical location if shown together in the correct context.

While technologies like Photo Pop-up and Photosynth may be widely used in the future, what kind of technologies can we use today in order to incoroporate at least a little sence of place?

Now, many websites, photo organizers or gadgets facilitate geotagging functionality. Geotagging allows users to add metadata to photos, that will allow to organize photos by the locations they were taken. Using geotagging you can see a map with photos attached to some particular locations. This makes organizing photos even more effective, and in some cases it is not required to put any effort and time, because some gadgets allow for automatic geotagging with built-in GPS systems. This technology further facilitates users' needs to manipulate with large number of photos, that were taken throughout a long time period and in lots of different places.

These technologies allow us to organize personal photos. What about 3d images that everybody is interested in? In 2005, Google Earth presented 3d images of major cities of the world. After upgrading to the latest version of Google Earth, users now can have a realistic 3d models of buildings in different cities. This was made available by users's submission using SketchUp, a 3d modeling program. In prior versions of Google Earth (before Version 4), 3D buildings were limited to a few cities, and had poorer rendering with no textures. Many buildings and structures from around the world now have detailed 3D structures; including (but not limited to) those in the United States, Canada, Ireland, India, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, Pakistan. Also recently Google Street View was fully integrated into the program allowing the program to provide a street level view in many locations. All these features that are now available can give a much better sense of place than ever before. Now we can introduce our own photos to maps and make them look like they are 3d models of places they were taken, creating a rich interactive visual landscape, and we can even get a sense of places we have never been before or of those we don't have photos from by connecting to the power of the collective, collaborative Internet.

3. articulate what you did not understand in the article but it sounded interesting and you would like to know more about it

Daniel Delany:

Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski, "Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D" ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Proceedings), 25(3), 2006, 835-846.

D. Hoiem, A.A. Efros, and M. Hebert, "Automatic Photo Pop-up", ACM SIGGRAPH 2005.

Diana Tamabayeva:

Charlie Sorrel, "How to Geotag Your Photos," Wired Magazine, May 12, 2008

Peter Birch, "Introducing Google Earth 4.3," Google LatLong Blog, April 16, 2008