Rano Raraku Synth

I just finished this synth of the statue quarry at Rano Raraku and it has to be one of the coolest things I've ever seen. This uses our blimp photos from 2006. Amazing.



http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=5C835782-4494-4FD4-A0A5-396064007534

Photosynth

Microsoft's new Photosynth is probably one of the coolest bit of technology released by the company in years. It is the product of Microsoft Research and a number of computer scientists from my old alma mater, the University of Washington. Photosynth is a web service that runs through a browser (Windows only for now) that takes stacks of digital photos and merges them into a single, mind-blowlingly cool 3-D arrangement. This is like a 3-dimensional panorama and ideal for photographing subjects where you want an overall view but also the ability to "drill down" to see detail. And Photosynth does this without any preset reference points -- it just takes the pile of photos taken from every crazy angle and matches up points across them all and then produces a 3-dimensional view.

One of the great thing that photosynth does for me is allow me to take blimp photos that have all sorts of yaw, roll, rotation issues and merge them into a single viewable entity. I've been working on this problem for a while - though a wide range of panorama building software (e.g., hugin, Panotools, Autopano, PTAssembler, Tatuk AIC, ArcMAP, ERDAS, DoubleTake, PTGui Pro, and many others). The problem I have is that the photos are so uncontrolled in the blimp in terms of their orientation and distance from subject (much less the issue of the ground topography) that the solutions are not very good and it take a lot of manual work to fix them (if that is even possible). The best solution Ive come up with right now is either Adobe Photoshop CS3 "PhotoMerge" option or PTGui Pro (though DoubleTake is great for a small # of photos). Both seem to work best when the camera has a constant height, the images are sequential, and the topography isnt too lumpy. That's great but it's not easy to achieve.

Photosynth really changes all of this since it is built to examine 3-dimensional things. It does a remarkable job of merging photos together that vary in height, roll, yaw, resolution - easily the best I've ever seen. Now, first thing others ask me about these products is whether or not you can "flatten them" to put into GIS -- that doesn't currently seem possible (it would require more processing to do integrated projection of the aggregate set of images). Ideally, that will be forthcoming but who knows (its free as it is). But as it stands right now, it is a powerful (and easy!) way of visualizing an archaeological landscape with all the detail you can possibly want (depending on your camera and the load on the photosynth servers - it has been pretty popular since being listed on Slashdot).

Here are a couple of the "synths" I've created in the last few days:

Easter Island: Rano Raraku: Rano Raraku - 2

Easter Island: : Akahanga-Easter Island

Guatemala: Cotuzmalguapa

Greece: Mycenae Acropolis

Greece: Mycenae - Lower Town

I'll post more as I create them.

Also, you might want to check how this works and what they have in mind for the future (imagine having a cumulative set of images from everyone in the world for any place) http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/findingpaths/

Temple of Poseidon

A panorama from our last day in Greece...

Type Variety, Systematics, and Scholarship

I recommend that those interested in archaeological systematics read Michael E. Smith's blog on Culbert and Rands' recent "type-variety" article in LAA. http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2008/08/news-flash-type-variety-classification.html Smith points out a serious failure in the editor/review/writing process in this article that resulted in the failure to cite previous literature that already did what they claimed to do (show that type-variety is flawed and cannot be a "single" classificatory system). The result is an article that is pretty much a "duh" for anyone who has read anything on classification or formal theory in archaeology. Sadly, the way their conclusions are framed - that ceramic complexity is too great -- will lead some to believe that the solution is some numerical technique, a bigger computer, or some new-boffo-annealing-self-organizing-strange-loops - or whatever. This of course misses the point that "ceramic complexity" isn't the problem, its the lack of a problem that is a problem. Without any question, there can't be a way of knowing whether any system of chopping up the world is better than any other. Without questions, what would the "right" (or "correct" or "real") classification look like? How would we know when we found it?

More immediately upsetting is the discipline's acceptance of poor scholarship - for example, literature reviews and relevant citation. When authors who are writing in Latin American Antiquity can't be bothered to read articles from the 70s in American Antiquity (all of which are available on JSTOR) and the reviewers and editors let them get away with that, then there really is a problem.

Science Writing - Compendium assembled by Dawkins

Just bought an edited volume by Richard Dawkins - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing - a great compendium of classic science essays from Dobzhansky to Eddington to Feynman to Sagan. A lot of these I have but the collection is a really wonderful and inspiring set of essays. These writings certain demonstrate how good science writing can be.