I recently attended TechVista — a technical symposium organised by Microsoft Research India in Chennai this conference introduced a brilliant new technology. At the same event, MSRI announced the “Digital Heritage” project. The Digital Heritage (DH) project was a direct consequence of minister Kapil Sibal announcing a collaboration between the Government of India and Microsoft Research.
The goal of the project is to provide a virtual experience which is as close as possible to actually visiting the historical monuments of India in person. DH provides an interactive 3D navigation experience by making use of technologies like Photosynth and HDView.
Photosynth is a technology that stitches together a number of photographs from multiple viewpoints to form a 3D representation of the objects in the images. The Photosynth website has a snippet that explains what it does:
Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.
Photosynth is a topic that deserves a post just for itself. Coming back to the topic of DH, the prototype demoed at TechVista demonstrated a guided demo through the Sri Andal temple at Srivilliputhur. The guys involved in the project made multiple fun trips to the temple and took tons of pictures (over 7000) and “synthed” them together. The end effect of all this hard work was a very effective representation of the temple in virtual space. Wading through the “point cloud” as they called it, was an out of the world experience. The background music and the narrative only added to the splendid effect, as the folks of Tamil Nadu could instantly connect to their beloved monument.
This project was steered by Aditya Sankar and Ajay Manchepalli among others. We are coaxing Aditya to write about his experiences (including anecdotes of gorging on the tasty idlies of murugan idly store and the paal khoa of Srivilliputhur) through the project on this blog. Keep an eye out for the insider view!
[Ed note]: To get a better idea of the experience, click on the thumbnails and make sure that you hit the magnifying glass at the right-top of the image, since resizing causes subsampling which omits quite a few of the points in the point cloud
Sans TechPress 