A lot of cool stuff happens at CMU, but this one blows my mind.

More here, be sure to check the demo movies.

Different, but in the same vein, The Campanile Movie from UC Berkeley in '97 still impresses me.

Matthew

Un-friggin-real!! And there's software we can download to try?! Must see if my University has Matlab lying around....

I'm not 3D artist (though I'd love to be one), but I wonder how many polygons/surfaces are on the underlying model of, say, the building photo. I'm often fooled by excelent texture maps and shaders which make the image look more complex than it really is. Was this program able to tell that every "column" has recess/abcess, or did it just create a huge rectangle based on the roofline/groundline?

More about the popup 4-pane image:
The upper right pane bird's eye view seems to show more detail on the horizontal walkway than the original image. Maybe those diagonal hash marks were gleaned from a "superpixel" photograph that they mention. Odd...

Still, amazing.