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.