Image of the week - Virtualizing Rome in a day

Virtualizing Rome in a day A screenshot of the 3-D model of Rome's Colosseum, generated using several thousand Flickr photos. The black points surrounding the Coliseum indicate the vantage points from which photographs were taken. Image courtesy Build Rome in a Day project Researchers at the University of Washington generated a 3-D model of Rome’s greatest landmarks in a day — and they did it by standing on the shoulders of Flickr users. The researchers applied their algorithms to 150,000 Flickr images of Rome. It took a computer cluster containing 496 cores 13 hours to match common points in the images, sorting them into groups based on the landmark depicted. Another eight hours of computation time, and they had 3-D models of landmarks such as the Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon. The Building Rome in a Day project, which is still in progress, aims to build a parallel distributed system that can use Flickr photographs to reconstruct