You might already know Google Building Maker, which is a little like a game. But here comes PhotoCity from the University of Washington and puts the “claiming a portion of the real world and get a badge for it” into the space of making 3D models.
There are photos of a location and program like PhotoSynth makes a 3D building from that. Now the program defines spaces in the neighborhood of the 3D model. It’s your task to take photos of these spaces (overlapping with known parts of the existing 3D-model), so that the 3D model can become larger. You can then claim the region that was added because of your pictures.
Here is their intro video:
But they don’t have a region near my home just yet. It says on the homepage that one can seed new regions but I don’t know how that works and who is allowed to do that. It seems all it takes is to register to the site and I will update this blog, when I have done that.
Tags: PhotoCity, photosynth
