Errol Morris is one of my favorite filmmakers, creating documentaries like The Fog of War that try to get at the truth of a matter through oral interviews with subjects. Morris does a bunch of research behind the scenes, but he rarely appears in his documentaries, even eschewing the usual narration that accompanies documentaries. In its place is deftly-edited responses from the interview subjects, making for films that are unlike anything else out there.
But it isn’t just the methodology that makes Morris’ movies good; there’s also a really incisive way of viewing the world that informs those interviews and the subsequent editing. Every once in a while, Morris will write an essay or something that finally lets him speak directly to the reader, and those occasions are a treat. What luck, then, to get Morris’s new monthly-ish series of essays on the New York Times website. They serve as a sort of preview to his upcoming film Standard Operating Procedure (S.O.P. for short), an investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses and the iconic phographs that made them known all around the world. As usual, Morris does the big-picture thing better than anyone else, asking what constitutes “truth” in photography and how we can get at it. (more…)
The new Google Earth 4.2 has a thoroughly-promoted planetarium feature, but quieter and less-noticed is the new Gigapan collaboration, whereby high-resolution photography is oriented to overlay the Google Earth representation from a specific angle, effectively allowing for a more detailed examination of that object while still retaining an idea of how those details correspond to the 3D-space. The video explains this better than I could in words, and there’s also a Data Mining blog post with decent-resolution pictures of the process.
This is a different - and less technically demanding - approach than Microsoft’s Photosynth technoology, which correlates hundreds of images to create a rough three-dimensional representation of an object, allowing you to view the object itself as a collection of points, with thousands of image-views to choose from, all automatedly oriented in the same way they were captured. Again, the process is easier to explain by trying it out on these Kennedy Space Center examples.
Both these examples are approximations of the real end goal, which is to not just create a 3D cloud of points, but a true 3D model of the object based off comparing all the pictures, with those pictures then used to project and map detail onto the rough 3D model. The effect is sort of like using an overhead projector to project and trace a larger version of a small drawing, except against something more complicated than a simple wall or whiteboard. This holy grail of image-data analysis would function something like the techniques Paul Debevec used to create his innovative Campanile Movie and, later, the background for that one shot in The Matrix. With that technology in place, it would be cheap, easy, and utterly effective to make a model of the Empire State Building (or any other landmark) by searching for that name on Flickr.
With more exacting versions of geotagging (associating pictures with the relevant latitude/longitude), the possibilities expand further. If GPS devices that recorded the position (and, possibly, the orientation) become embedded into the cameras we buy, it’ll become trivial to find all the pictures taken within a few hundred yards of a location. 3D modeling would suddenly become possible for not just the glamorous and widely-known locations, but also down to individual houses in neighborhoods. While some may cry foul to the potentially-invasive nature of such hyper-geotagging, Google’s already driving around with vans that capture the entire swath of area viewable from the street. And in any such case, the future has a habit of happening despite our strongest intentions otherwise.
No one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people – and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough for three people walking abreast, connects to another underground town six miles away. Other passages suggest that at one time all of Cappadocia, above and below the ground, was linked by a hidden network. Many still use the tunnels of this ancient subway as cellar storerooms.
