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2d3 Launches AltiMap Mapping Software

Hi! The news from Government Video Blogs.

2d3 has released version 1.0 of its AltiMap software, which creates accurate geospatial maps from aerial imagery captured by high resolution cameras. AltiMap supports cameras ranging from consumer-level digital cameras up to the most advanced aerial imaging systems.

Traditional automated mapping systems have been reliant upon aircraft instrumentation and camera hardware. AltiMap allows for the automated generation of the same quality of image product using images alone or images and a commercially available GPS receiver. The geo-located results can be exported as single images or tiled hierarchies of images, compatible with almost all mapping software such as Google Earth and ArcView GIS.

“With the advent of freely available geospatial software and tools, we see great opportunity for products such as AltiMap to accelerate the production of geospatial imagery,” said Jon Damush, 2d3 president. “AltiMap was developed to make it easy for anyone, from expert image analysts to aerial photographers, to create geo-located map product from aerial imagery without having to be an expert at image manipulation or photogrammetry. Anyone familiar with attempting to use consumer photo stitching software to make a map will immediately recognize the benefits of AltiMap.”

2d3's Advanced Imaging Group specializes in applying vision science techniques to still and motion imagery to allow decision makers to better sift through and understand this mountain of media. 2d3 has specific expertise in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaisance (ISR) operations, especially those from airborne platforms such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited 2009 Build 61

For all of you have found the review of Autodesk Stitcher.

Autodesk® Stitcher™ Unlimited photo stitching software offers professionals and enthusiasts easy-to-use tools for creating high-quality panoramas. From dramatic backdrops for film and game productions, to stunning images for artistic display, Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited panorama software can automatically assemble a wide variety of images.With its highly intuitive user interface, five-step workflow, and powerful photo stitching technology, Stitcher enables you to merge your images intelligently, in just a few clicks.

Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited 2009 photo stitching software introduces powerful, new creative tools and functionality to enable you to quickly create wide-angle images and panoramas for engaging virtual tours, interactive 3D web content, large-format panoramic prints, and seamless matte paintings.

Highlights of Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited 2009:
* Automatic photo stitching engine—Create partial or full spherical panoramas in just a few clicks. All the steps can be automated: stitching, alignment, and color;;;; correction.
* Double shot—Stitch together images taken with a two-shot fish-eye lens. This enables you to create fully spherical virtual tours with only two pictures.
* Image-based lighting—Create exceptionally high-quality environment maps and panoramas through support for EXR and HDR input and output.
* Hotspot support—Create Apple® QuickTime® VR application program hotspots and links integrated within a panorama that reference another panorama.
* Tripod cap—Cover up the tripod in your image with an image of your own.
* GPU acceleration Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited 2009 is optimized to take advantage of graphics card graphics processing units (GPUs) to preview rendering in the main viewport. The GPU is now also used to accelerate final renders.
* Selectable rendering area—Use the crop tool to precisely select an area to be rendered. This tool can be used while in full-screen mode.
* New user interface and workflow—Stitcher Unlimited 2009 has been given a new look and feel through a redesigned user interface, including new icons and a new palette to manage thumbnails more efficiently.

System Requirements
Software
Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited 2009 software is supported on the following operating systems and more recent versions:

* Microsoft Windows XP Professional, (SP2) 32-bit
* Microsoft ® Windows Vista® Business, (SP1) 32-bit
* Apple® Mac OS; X 10.4.10 and 10.5.2 (Intel; processor version only)

To be able to load panoramas in Apple® QuickTime; application program format (MOV) the following software is required:
* Apple QuickTime 7

Hardware
At a minimum, Stitcher Unlimited 2009 requires a system with the following hardware:
* Intel; Pentium 4 (or equivalent) processor, 1 GHz or faster
* Macintosh®: Intel®-based Macintosh computers
* 512 MB RAM for Windows XP / 1 GB RAM for Windows Vista® operating system (2 GB recommended)
* 200 MB free hard drive space (for installation), 2 GB recommended
* Ethernet adapter
* Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL® 1.2 professional graphics card with latest graphics driver available on vendor’s site.
* Two-button mouse with mouse driver software
* DVD-ROM drive

Students master welding

The story by Josh Potter.

The machinery lining the concrete floors of the COT welding shop loomed with potential energy, even though most of the students had gone home for the day and the oily arms and mechanical rudders were still.

Chris Brown watched classmate Seth Nemitz wheel his son around in a wagon made cozier with blankets and pillows.

Nemitz likes to remind people that the wagon — a paragon of wholesome, childish fun — was once a skeletal frame of metal. Before that, lines on a blueprint.

Most things start out that way, he said.

But it was Nemitz’s ability to fuse form with function, using electrodes to melt two pieces of metal together and form the frame for a child’s wagon, which won him first place in the James F. Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation welding competition.

The foundation has been rewarding welding students for their projects since 1936. It was originally a straightforward essay contest, in which students would submit essays on technical processes. Now, students must submit an essay describing one of their projects, along with blueprints and a photo of it.

“Can they read that paper along with the blueprints and build this?” Nemitz asked.

The $1,000 and the welder the Foundation gave Nemitz proves that, in his case, the Foundation could figure out how he went from blueprint to completed wagon.

“You look around you and there’s not much not made out of metal,” Nemitz says.

But not everything is simple, steel framework. In the best metal work, you can’t even tell where the joints were connected. That’s what makes the difference between an I-beam that holds a building up and a sleek backyard barbeque.

That was Brown’s project.

“I just wanted a barbeque smoker, so I made one,” Brown said.

The Foundation gave Brown $75 for his merit award.

Brown wore a burnt, oil-stained work jacket and heavy-duty work boots, but spoke like a Ph.D.

“I looked at how the metal would react to the embers,” he says. “The heat after a while would corrode it. You have to think about heat distribution around the whole grill.”

He goes on to talk about the difference between stitch welding and flux core, and that stick welding is pretty much the same as spot welding — or was it arc welding? Either way, the blueprint Nemitz worked from looked nothing like a wagon.
He pointed to a few logarithmic lines scattered on the piece of paper and explained exactly what part of the wagon they represent.

“This is the wheel hub assembly,” he said.

“A monkey can squeeze a trigger, but you have to learn to weld,” said welding instructor Mark Raymond.

Students in the welding program at the COT can spend up to eight hours in classes, plus time in the shop to finish up projects.

“You’re learning as you’re going,” Brown said. “It’s just like a job.”

Brown and his classmates show up to the COT building by 6:45 a.m. to start their AutoCAD class where they learn how to use 3D design software. Then they head off to machining, welding, lunch and more welding.

It’s all worth it, though, Brown said.

“Just being in a shop,” he said. “I can’t do anything else, really, but with my hands. I love it.”

Loving the work was the only way Nemitz said it was possible to spend nearly 50 hours of work building his wagon.

About a year ago, Nemitz and his son were picking pumpkins with a rickety old wagon when he was inspired to build his project wagon, which converts to a sled with ski attachments.

“My son, he’s the whole reason behind it,” Nemitz says.

So, since last fall up until the beginning of this semester, Nemitz, Brown and other COT students worked on their projects to compete in the national competition.

The wagon looks like something out of a cheery Norman Rockwell paining – if Norman Rockwell knew anything about steel reinforcements, studded wheels and all-terrain capabilities. It’s something Calvin and Hobbes could have thought up in their most creative fantasies.

It’s a scientific process turning two sheets of metal into a children’s all-terrain transport vehicle. It’s an artistic process to make metal meet a picky child’s specifications.

Welding, Raymond said, is a little bit of both.

“I think most of it’s Zen, getting lost in the focus,” he said.

Making Your Band: Printing 3D Rock Band Figurines

Wow! It's really interesting!

Bringing a 2D Rock Band into the third dimension.

So much for putting your picture on a magazine, print it in 3D.

The consumer industry isn’t quite there yet, but the latest partnership between Harmonix, the videogame development company that has turned the world into arm-chair rock stars with the Rock Band franchise, and Z Corporation (Z Corp), the Burlington, MA-based developer and manufacturer of 3D printers, has come one step closer to fully customized 3D-printed figurines.

Gamers who play Rock Band on a network enabled Playstation 3 (PS3) and XBOX 360 are not just virtually strumming, banging or singing along with the music. Gamers have the ability to create an avatar in the game, and as he/she becomes better at the game he/she earns money to buy accessories to outfit their rock star, such as clothes, shoes, haircuts and every other manor of decoration. A player can even draw logos for T-shirts or tattoos.

The gamer can then load their character information up to the internet and visit the Merch Booth on Rock Band Store where he/she can pull their customized avatar up, pick a pose and order a 3D printed figurine that is about 6” tall and weighs 10 to 12 ounces (the collectables are dense, it’s like picking up a ceramic piece in similar dimensions).

Z Corp’s two major challenges came in the translation of the video game’s semi-3D data into full 3D data, and the operation of taking 3D-printed parts in relative volume and printing them cleanly and efficiently in order to keep costs minimal.

In the video games, the characters are represented in 3D. Similar to CAD data, the characters are in a 2D environment on the screen, but 3D in reality.

The Harmonix team translates the video game data into 3D printable data and the orders are sent to Z Corp’s facility electronically, where they print it out and ship it off to the customer.

In order to make the video game characters printable, Harmonix has taken the semi-3D data from the game and created a parallel database full of 3D data.

“That was a technical challenge that took work,” reflects Scott Harmon, vice president of business development with Z Corp. “It was a collaborative effort and it was a lot about communication with the Harmonix guys. They shared the first bit of character data with us and we pointed out the shortcomings or the things that would cause problems in the 3D printing world based on that data.”

Harmonix figured out how to adjust the game assets so they can be printed and stitched together. “At the end of the day, you need watertight solids to be 3D printable and you have to take all of the hollow geometry that they use in video game data and seal it off,” says Harmon. “The video game data is not watertight 3D data like you would get out of real CAD. Every asset – every pair of pants, shoes or shirt – has a game asset which is optimized for screen rendering. When the 3D printable file is created, it essentially pulls all of the 3D printable assets and stitches them together before the file comes of to us.”

Rise Of The Machines

When the two companies first shook hands, Z Corp was doing the primary printing on its ZPrinter 450, the most modern machine that the company had when the service was launched. The 450 has a 300 x 450 dpi resolution that prints high performance composite material in layers from 0.089 to 0.102 mm thick.

The company is currently transitioning the service to the ZPrinter 650 in order to provide the consumers with a superior collectable.

“We’ve been moving production over to the 650, because the color and resolution on the 650 are just unbelievable on that machine,” says Harmon. “It really does make a difference on how the figures look to the customer. The colors pop, they’re very accurate and the detail is unbelievable.”

Both the 450 and 650 print using layers of a plaster composite powder. The system lays down a layer of plaster composite powder using print heads to selectively bind the solid portions. Print heads also apply color on the outside of the layer simultaneously.

“All of the color data, including the avatar’s tattoos and insignia that are created within in the game, are applied to the character during the printing process,” says Harmon.

The figurines can be handled, but they shouldn’t be played with, the market is still far from printing anything dubbed an action figure.

“We definitely are not advertising these as being toys, they are figurines, collectables,” adds Harmon. “They are durable enough that they can be shipped around.” According to Harmon, the rockers can be handled, but if you whack them hard enough on the counter top you could critically damage a Mohawk or custom guitar. Here’s to hoping the characters are placed in proper homes so any fatal blow to a pair of studded bell bottoms can be avoided.

The market for consumer printables is seemingly endless – with nearly every new video game environment operating in a virtual third dimension. With the current state of the economy, people have been hesitant to spend the $80 to $100 that it takes to make a figurine.

“We ship thousands of these things across the whole business, but it is clearly a consumer electable purchase,” says Harmon. “It’s not a must have, it’s a want. The market is potentially millions of pieces, but there are definitely sensitivities around how much people are willing to spend for them."

Z Corp took a number of steps both in terms of operational software and standard labor analysis to make sure that they had a process that, from beginning to end, would be quick in terms of how much time it took an operator to get a batch of parts through the system.

The standard manufacturing time takes two to three days, but sometimes there is a feature that can’t be printed. Z Corp prescreens the characters, but occasionally they run into a guitar, a certain hairstyle or a pose that won’t work – causing the aforementioned Mohawk melee.

The company also has to be on the lookout for copyright infringement – you can’t print a pre-Yoko Lennon character from the latest Beatles edition – but Harmon notes that the issue has surfaced as much as Z Corp anticipated.

“We have run into some copyright issues,” says Harmon. “You can create your own tattoo or logo for a t-shirt and we have had people who have created Rolling Stones logos and things like that, so we do keep and eye out, both at Harmonix and Z Corp, for copyright violations. Now, I don’t know how many copyrights or trademarks there are in the universe, and there is just no way that you can know what all of them are, but if there is anything remotely obvious such as sports teams or the big, real rock bands you see occasionally, but that has been really minimal.”

Less than ten figurines have been sent back as the result of copyright red flags. “It’s something that we were really worried about initially,” he adds, “but we really haven’t had a problem with it.”

It’s Not Cutting Clay

Rock Band Bass Player, not sure why, but I think he looks like a Pops.

Z Corp continues to talk to other video game vendors and is also looking at different sizes and price points.

“We do think that price point is an interesting piece of the mix and if you can bring the price down and let people still get there customized character, the detail is so good even on a smaller figure it looks really good,” says Harmon.

Pretty much any game that is now created could have a 3D printable.

“There is a cost benefit tradeoff, but 3D printables works for games where the community is an important piece of it. Rock Band has a big community, so it works well in an environment where people are sharing avatars and YouTube videos. If the sense of community isn’t as big, it reduces the likelihood that people are actually going to buy the avatar.”

Harmon and his associates at Z Corp still struggle pretty mightily with having potential clients come to grips with the technology. Some people hear figurine and can’t get past a clay mode.

“The idea that you can get something that is fully customized to the individual is a pretty novel concept so awareness is still quite low,” says Harmon. “There are customizations that you can make to hair, body type and apparel, but to get a real representation of yourself — you then start talking about scan data or 2D photo to 3D mesh conversion technology and in the not-too-distant future. You’ll soon see services where you can take photo data and get a 3D character out of it.”

The way the 450 and 650 are used everyday is to enhance the innovative capability of engineers and designers and allow them to try different designs and new ideas, and enable them to communicate the ideas effectively.

“The fact that we have a service that you can sell these things to consumers is an indication of how fast the machines operate and how good the detail is,” says Harmon.

Rock Band Guitar Player. I think I'll name him Spike Thrasher.

Action Figure Capability

We are still pretty far from printing an action figure.

Z Corp’s primary research and development has two paths that they pursue. The first is improving the appearance of the model.

“We always want these things to look more and more realistic,” says Harmon. “Frankly, we’d like the models to look like a full-color injection molded part and we’re getting pretty close with the 650 to achieving that objective.

The second thing Z Corp wants is to make them more durable.

“The threshold is really high,” adds Harmon. “Even if you create an injection-molded part out of the Rock Band figures, I don’t think it would be a toy that you could sell to kids, because you still have enough of the fine features that will break off and be choking hazards, even in plastic.”

Harmon suspects that in the three-to-five year range, it could be possible to print something similar to an action figure, emphasizing “possible.”

“It still wouldn’t necessarily be a toy and it’s not something that we would sell to kids,” he says, “because that’s a whole different kind of liability.”

Hands On: Fujifilm Real 3D W1 Digital Camera

Ouch! The new camera with build-in 3D function... Just read this article by Corinne Iozzio with me.

Finally available in the U.S. Fuji's camera and frame let you capture and view 3D images and video, sans goofy glasses.

In the past, in order to take a stereoscopic 3D photo, photogs had to fashion their own hacked shooting rigs of conjoined cameras wired into a central shutter. But even with all that, 3D shots taken with those setups still can't be seen with the naked eye. Fujifilm's Real 3D system, which is available in the U.S. today, includes a camera, digital frame, and print center that creates 3D images you can see without those flimsy glasses.

First up, the FinePix Real 3D W1 digital camera ($600). Just like costly stereoscopic rigs, the W1 has two side-by-side 10-megapixel lenses separated about as far as human eyes (about 2.75 inches) that capture two images simultaneously focused on the same point in front of the camera. The two shots are instantly combined inside the camera to create a MPO-JPEG (the "MP" is for "multi-picture"), instead of your standard JPEG. It also captures 3D movies in stereo 3D-AVI at 640-by-480 or 320-by-240 pixels at 30 frames per second.

The real trick, though, is in the screen: the 2.8-inch LCD uses directional light control to display the MPO and 3D-AVI files in 3D that's visible with the naked eye. Directional light control displays two different sets of light, one pointed at your right eye and other at your left, that flash quickly enough back and forth to give the illusion of depth.

All this happens quickly in 3D auto mode, but there also manual settings to tinker with. Individual Shutter 3D, for example, snaps only one shot at a time, and displays a ghost of the first image on the screen to guide the second snap. The W1 can also take regular 2D photos, either one at a time or two at once. The dual-shot feature comes in handy for landscape or panorama shooting, though there's no in-camera editing option to stitch the shots together on the fly. How Fujifilm's 3D Vision Works: Fuji's system projects images and video in such a way that your eyes and brain are tricked into seeing in 3D.

I had an hour or so to play around with the W1 last week, and it's impressive. The camera is heavy, but it's metal body feels very sturdy despite its brick-like-ness. Snaps I took of my coffee cup and danish popped on the LCD just the way Fuji's engineers said they would. I also had fun tinkering with the image ghosting (or parallax) controls, which let you control how much overlap there is between the two JPEGs to determine what part of the image you want to appear in 3D; I was able to shift focus from my mug to a camera in the background, for example

Fuji has also created options for off-camera, glasses-free viewing. The V1 Digital Viewer ($500) is an 8-inch LCD display that uses a parallax viewing system to render in 3D. This system, like the camera LCD directional light, points light at each eye individually, but in a slightly different way. The viewer has a second LCD overlaid that only displays thin, vertical black lines that quickly flash on and off on the right and left side. Once you find the screen's "sweet spot," (which could take a bit of bobbing your head back and forth, as it did for me) images and video appear to pop.

Fuji has also partnered with Nvidia to bring the Real 3D system to computers -- albeit with the glasses. With the help of Nvidia 3D Vision glasses, a 120-Hz monitor, and a current Nvidia graphics card, you can view the W1's MPO and 3D-AVI files on your PC.

The Real 3D system is available direct from Fuji starting today.


Heh... Found this idea exciting, but it is built on hologram-like technique. I use the software to make 3D objects and 3D Panorams from photos. If only I could try ro make one example with this cam photos... May be someone of the Blogger readers use this cam already? Could you be so kind to try stitching photos made with it? I'm afraid that I can just spend 600$ for the product that is unsuitable for my needs :(