A month ago, in The Swarm is Watching, I said that random, small groups would start building 3d models of the world, because they could. Building Rome in a Day is a project out of the University of Washington to do just that:

Dubrovnik

At the time of our experiments, there were only 58,000 images of Dubrovnik on Flickr. For this city we were able to experiment with the entire collection. Matching took only 5 hours on 352 compute cores. The largest and most interesting component corresonds to the old city. It is interesting that the reconstruction time for Dubrovnik is so much more than that for Rome. The reason lies in how the data sets are structured. The Rome data set is essentially a collection of landmarks which at large scale have a simple geometry and visibility structure. The largest connected component in Dubrovnik on the other hand captures the entire old city. With its narrow alley ways, complex visibility and widely varying view points, it is a much more complicated reconstruction problem, and this is reflected in the time it took to solve it.

Also worth noting is the fact that the reconstruction is not restricted to the city itself, as can be seen in the video below, it also contains the hills surrounding the city and part of Lokrum island which is south east of the city.

Labels: faster is different