Late last night, the New York Times published an article on how Al-Qaeda sympathizers use the internet to spread propaganda supporting their ideological causes. I was able to track the site down shortly after the article was published, but it was quickly forced offline (maybe by the traffic of bloggers independently finding the site and pointing to it?) with only Google’s cache remaining. But luckily for our little academic investigation here, the author of that site previously maintained a mirror on Wordpress.com that allows you to look through the archives for interest’s sake.
Posts Tagged ‘Technology’
The Internet breaks things
Monday, October 15th, 2007The loneliest page on the internet
Saturday, October 13th, 2007A PC vs. Mac forum with thousands of posts, but only one user. Exceedingly odd, with tendrils reaching over into creepiness as well.
Lawrence Lessig interview on corruption
Sunday, October 7th, 2007
Lawrence Lessig talks about his shift from fighting for better copyright law to his new efforts in stopping government corruption.
Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible music video
Saturday, October 6th, 2007Arcade Fire’s new interactive music video for the song “Neon Bible” off their album of the same name. See also: Arcade Fire playing “Neon Bible” and “Wake Up” in a cargo elevator and the middle of their audience in one of the more touching videos I’ve seen.
PhotoViewing in Google Earth 4.2
Monday, August 27th, 2007
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.