“Make3D” is an algorithm developed by two Stanford computer scientists, which can convert any 2D image to 3D model, the model is made in flash so you can fly around and explore the generated 3D model.
“The algorithm uses a variety of visual cues that humans use for estimating the 3-D aspects of a scene, If we look at a grass field, we can see that the texture changes in a particular way as it becomes more distant.” said Ashutosh Saxena, a doctoral student in computer science who developed the Make3d website with Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science.
After all the website is impressive although still in experimental phase and has few bugs, but you can fully convert any image from 2D to 3D but it is best to convert a scenery image rather than an image that includes people because it still does not work well with people.
Here is a video to give you an idea what its all about:
As you know there is a number of social news/bookmarking websites such as Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. People share articles, websites, photos, videos and so on. Digg already announced that they will be having a special section only for images but it still didnt happen.
Here comes PICURLS, basically this website pulls all the top photos of the day from Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Simpy, Furl, Boing Boing and Wired. You can also subscribe to the RSS feeds for the pictures from each website or from all of the websites.
But PICURLS still have space for improvement, the 2 main drawbacks that i can see is that there is no community, none of the images has any comments, at least for the past few days, all what i can see is the number “0″ beside each image. The second thing is that when you click on the link it sends you to the source not the page of the website such as Digg and Reddit, i am not if this being done out of fear that maybe Digg or Reddit wont allow this to happen.
Anyway, in general this is a very nice website, and one day it could become something if it kept on developing.
