Google Earth in browser!

Need to install one plugin, then you can tour Google Earth with 3D buildings in the web browser.
UWA School of Physics

Minority Report gadget come to live

It is so so cool!!

sixth sense - a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

Making Google Street View into 3D

I was very excited about Google Street View in Australia. I think in a computer vision point of view, it provides such a huge amount of usable multiple views data to play with.

One idea I have is to:
1. Run the SIFT descriptor (by David Lowe) over the photos along one street to grab the interest points,
2. Ran RANSAC with rather loose tolerance to find homography match, and classify regions into planar surfaces. Maybe some super pixel algorithm will be useful to grow small region into bigger one based on colour information.
3. Transform the Street View into a 3D cardboard style walk through like the Photo Popup I mentioned before.

I think it would work. And because we know it's on a street, there are many constraints that can be added like we know the ground under is flat and it's pretty much sky on top kind of things.

If you're reading this and implement the algorithm and got a paper published or something, just give me an honourary mention will do. ;)

On a non-technical note, here is one place that it didn't quite work out on Street View. There's clearly a road there, but it didn't show it.



Or on Street View live:

View Larger Map

Google Street view in Australia!

Google gets down and detailed on the street where you live


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

If you know where I live, you can even see my Daihatsu parked on the side of the road. Haha! That's pretty cool.

Urban 3D Modelling from Video

Urban 3D Modelling from Video - University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and University of Kentucky



More video and details on their website.

Google SydneyTrip & UWA won the competition

This is 2 weeks old. As mentioned in the Happy^Googleplex post, We went over to Sydney on an all expenses paid trip by Google. We flew in on 17/2 Sunday, spent a day at Google office on Darling Harbour on 18th and most of the team went back on 19th. Me and Minh stayed for one more day with Danno.

Highlights:

• We were greeted by a chauffeur with our names on a cardboard at the airport. It was my first time having my name on a cardboard at airport. But I was disappointed that there wasn't a big Google sign on it. Even more disappointed that it wasn't a Google van that took us to our hotel.
• We were put in Amore hotel. Very nice and classy. My room was on 17th floor. Nice view.
  
• Danno met us up for dinner at Pancake on the rock. Good pancake, I like it and like it a lot.

• Monday 9am we met at Google office on Darling Harbour, in the IBM building. We met our 'competitors' too. Haha! Both other teams were from Melbourne U, both were two people team. Compare to us 8 people big full team from UWA to out number everyone, muahaha!
  
• SketchUp user interface designer Matt flew in from US to give us a tech talk.
• Will and Lysandra accompanied us in the Google office tour - but we weren't allowed to take photos beyond the reception. Bummer. But it is nice inside, open space. Food around people.
• Our team and two other Melbourne Uni teams gave a talk on our journey of modelling, it was very informal and fun.
  
• Food is great inside Google! We made our own pizza and roll from the salad bar. There was crab meat on that day.
  
• XBox and Playstation with huge screen mounted on the wall for Googlers' gaming craze during lunch time.
• We went on a tour of Sydney in the afternoon with the Googlers.
  
• Winners were anounced at the hotel atrium before dinner. And our UWA team took the crown. Yes! Each of us were awarded with a goodie bag.
• Google treated us a nice dinner on Darling Harbour looking over the Opera House. Fancy! And there were many quiz challenges from Will, fun!
  

• Most of the team went back on Tuesday. But me and Minh stayed for one more day and Danno took a day off to take us to Blue Mountain. So touched, thanks mate. And Super Horatio helped clear the heavy fog for us there. It was fun. A lot more fun that last time when I went alone.
  
• And at that night I stayed with my UTas best friend Jermin and Yeemei's place. They took me to a Shanghainese restaurant and I was stuffed with fantastic food. So yummy. And that night we chatted till 3am and had to go to airport at 7am.
  
• Me and Minh flew back on Wednesday morning together wearing the proud Google T-shirt.
  

Photos are here:
Evgeni's version


Mine:

2008_02_17-19 Sydney Google trip

And once we come back, Jayjay has been at work to channel out the news that we did win the competition.

UWA News (27 February 2008)


Loconuts (28 February 2008)


Subiaco Post (1 March 2008)


Western Suburb (4 March 2008)


Joondalup Times (5 March 2008)

Turning any monitor in to a 3D VR display

Using Wii, this CMU phd student made a monitor into a portal to the virtual world!!

Turning any monitor in to a 3D VR display

Google eyeing operations in Malaysia

This will be nice if it is realised.

Reuters: Google eyeing operations in Malaysia

Toyata Robot plays violin

From Reuters

African fractals on TED

I stumbled upon this great talk on TED.
Ron Eglash on African fractals.



Try this Cornrow fractal with 250 iterations, 2% starting dilation, 75% translation, 20 degree rotation and 102% dilation.

VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

Cool 3D modelling application developed at Adelaide U, appeared in Siggraph 2007.
VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

Thanks Danno.

Online Virtual UWA

A quick note on the virtual UWA project I've been involved. It's launched last Friday and well received. All the ungodly hours spent on the 3D modelling was glorified.

Read the story here.

This Winthrop Hall model is one of my work.


The virtual UWA is online at http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/virtual and you can choose an avatar and see many panorama views of UWA. Need to download the BS Contact to see it, the instruction is on the site.
At this moment, the 3D models are not up yet. Eventually they will.

Firefox 2.0.0.4 Bug

I just updated to Firefox 2.0.0.4 and the middle mouse click (open link in new tab) doesn't work!
It's the very reason why I initially switched to Firefox from IE many years ago. Man! How do I surf the net without this function?

Is anyone else using that? Am I the only one having this crazy bug?
Not happy. :(

Updated:
Oh, it's actually not a Firefox bug, but the SuperT add-on bug! Well, it works now after SuperT is disabled.
Life's Good. :)

I make confusing road signs

I've got some result for my phd to show today. Take a road sign and swap the direction.
With 4 points correspondance, it's rather straight forward to compute the projective relationship (homography) between two planar surfaces. The novelty of this work is the smooth and perspectively correct interpolation of the transition.

You might have seen planar surfaces flying around in space in other animation work before. The difference is that those work are done in 3D space so the 3D coordinates of the objects need to be specified and then the scene projected (rendered) on 2D screen. Mine works in 2D - a 2D photograph and some corner points as input, the algorithm works out the homography, decompose it into perspective, scale, rotation and translation components and interpolates the picture properly.

Cool! I think it is.

I created a related page on my CSSE website here with animated gif.
Projective interpolation for animation

Some interesting vision and graphics work

Eyeball reflection of the world


Radial Imaging Systems


Motion Magnification

Microsoft Libra

I stumbled upon this Libra search, looks like it is the Microsoft version of Google Scholar.

It has a good breakdown on computer science fields, the conferences in each field, the number of publications in the search and their number of citations.

Here are links to Peter, Amitava, and myself.

The browse by author feature is pretty cool. A straight fight of citation. Andrew Zisserman is at the top of computer vision, followed by Faugeras!

Jason juggling

Yeah! This is really cool. I can blog straight from my k800i. Yes, without computer.
And jason happened to come to my desk and i can test this. :-D

Working @ Google - Software Engineer, Computer Vision and Graphics

Software Engineer, Computer Vision and Graphics - Mountain View

I think working at Google is really cool! And I do love organising information.
I'm delighted to know that they want some Computer Vision and Graphics experts. Maybe I'll work there one day.

Damned C/C++! I don't have extensive experience with that!! :(

Blog Archive Bug?

Is this just my blog?

What happen to my 2007?

I'm stucked in 2006!!

Help!!!

Photo pop up for UWA

Jayjay (our school manager at CSSE) sparked the idea of making nice 3D walkthrough for the entire UWA campus. And he asked me to create this photo pop up of UWA after he saw this in my presentation to highschool students at the Siemen Science Experience at UWA.

So here's the page:
Photo pop up for UWA

Note: Most of the tests turned out to be totally rubbish. It really requires nice clean ground, nice clean sky and rigid walls (at least that's my limited experience of using it). UWA has many trees, the algorithm doesn't seem to like that.