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Make3D turns your vacation photos into 3D worlds

Ever wish you could recreate the effect of those neat multilens 3D cameras without having to buy the hardware? Lucky for you there's some cool 3D technology coming out of Stanford called Make3D. The service uses machine learning to go over your photograph and recreate depth and perspective in three dimensions.

Once photographs have gone through processing, you get a flyover that does a quick back and forth over the rendered scenery. You also get a 3D environment that you can walk though using the keyboard's arrow keys. Users can download both of these files to their desktops for later viewing.

I uploaded about half a dozen photographs earlier today and only got one to go through the seemingly stringent processing requirements. However, the results on a picture of a beach were fast and impressive. The technology is not quite perfect, but there's already a huge gallery of user-uploaded images that have been run through the process and come out the other side with an extra dimension that makes them wonderful to explore. You can view pictures on the gallery without having to sign-up. Just keep in mind, you've got to have Adobe's Shockwave player installed on your browser to get the 3D goodness.

A similar service from Freewebs called fotowoosh has been around since last April. Although, it doesn't have a clear front end for consumers to publish their own photos. Also worth mentioning is Microsoft Live Labs' Photosynth project, which creates a 3D environment using a matrix of photos.

Make3D is a project lead by Ashutosh Saxena, who is joined by Min Sun, and Sung Chung along with Stanford faculty member Professor Andrew Ng.

Here's a video of the tech in action. There are two more after the break.

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Photos: Jet pack dreams take flight

For those of you who've lost hope that you'll ever have a robot butler or drive a hovercraft, here's a glimmer of possibility: a jet pack! Thunderbolt Aerosystems has developed the Thunderpack, a "rocket belt" that can propel you through the air at up to 75 miles per hour. Okay, so it will only fly for 45 seconds. And it'll cost you $100,00 to buy one. Then there's the fact that I'm sure a few safety-freakish representatives of Congress will do everything in their power to keep these out of the … Read more

Gickr does software-free animated GIF creation

I was at a bit of an impasse earlier today while writing about the new Google Maps page that lets you see user adjustments in real-time. A video to show off the feature would have been overkill, while an animated GIF afforded the same view to readers at a substantially smaller file size. Not having Photoshop installed on this machine (which has a pretty simple animated-GIF-making wizard), and not wanting to go through a tedious multistep process using Paint.net, I turned to Gickr.

Gickr is a simple tool that lets you upload up to 10 files from Flickr or … Read more

Scan photos and business cards on the run

If you frequent trade shows or spend a lot of time making new business contacts, you invariably wind up with stacks of business cards and the tedious task of adding the info to your contact manager. A card scanner can speed up the process considerably; now's your chance to scoop one up for $16.99, shipped, after a $60 mail-in rebate.

The Plustek OptiCard 820 is a portable color scanner designed for business cards and photos up to 4x6 inches. It weighs just under 7 ounces and draws power from your PC's USB port, so there's no … Read more

iPhone showdown: Picasa versus Photobucket

Photo-sharing and -storage sites Picasa Web (click for Picasa's PC download) and Photobucket announced new mobile interfaces this week. While m.photobucket.com and picasaweb.google.com/mobile (or via Google's new mobile interface: mobile.google.com) grant access to online albums from any mobile browser, the interface on iPhone's full Safari browser is still a special case. iPhone's large, sharp screen is ideal for viewing slide shows, but bars users from directly uploading iPhone photos to Web sites.

While this essentially leaves Picasa handcuffed as a mobile photo viewer, Photobucket's site provides an account-linked … Read more

Top 5 download updates from Macworld

With Macworld in full swing, throngs of people are flooding the streets of San Francisco to check out the latest offerings from Apple and all the other vendors exhibiting their wares at the expo. But some Mac-related stuff is only indirectly related to what's happening on the showroom floor or how thin the new MacBook Air is.

One thing I've noticed as a Mac software editor is how, when Apple has its biggest show of the year, the majority of Mac software developers figure it is the best time to release an update for their apps. I've … Read more

BlackBerry roundup: Mobile photo apps

Of the photo solutions mentioned in the BlackBerry forums I've been visiting lately, SplashPhoto and Ascendo Photos were the two most-often mentioned. That's just the kind of head-to-head challenge I like, and I threw in one more, ITookThisOnMyPhone, for flavor.

Ascendo Photos Desktop ($29.95) gathers JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, and PNG photos on your PC in a crisp, smart interface. The photo organization is reminiscent of Picasa--sibling images in a folder are horizontally arranged, with folders scrolling vertically. Photos drag and drop into an emulator, which you use to center the photo and perform basic editing--rotation, flipping, and color correction. Three sizing choices determine if photos appear cropped, shrunken, or alarmingly large. A button click transfers photos from desktop to device.

On the BlackBerry, Ascendo Photos shows transfered images clearly, but not quite cogently. It requires a click too many to see your photos, and the app wastes an opportunity to corral snaps taken from the cell phone. However, there's good file information; options to save to phone or SD memory, add galleries, and assign icons; and the ability to e-mail photos.… Read more

Photobucket goes mobile, launches pocket-friendly site

Photobucket is launching a mobile version of its service today and can be found at m.Photobucket.com. Users with any browser-enabled handset will be able to search and browse both public and privately uploaded photos at up to five at a time using keypad shortcuts. Additionally Photobucket is pushing user uploads of both photos and videos from their phones as a new feature, although this functionality has been around since late 2006 using the slightly less glamorous MMS and e-mail route as opposed to coding an app for phones on the Windows Mobile or Symbian platforms.

Photobucket's internal … Read more

Photos: Cars gone wild at CES 2008

CES dedicated a hall to in-vehicle technology presenters, and many of them brought the wildest cars you've ever seen. These cars sprout LCDs, amps, and speakers on any and every available surface. We took a walk around to find the most outlandish, outrageous cars on display.

Click here for photos of show cars at 2008 CES.