Computer scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology (also known in Georgia Bulldawg circles as the wreck down at tech) and
Microsoft Research have developed 4D Cities, a software that shows the
evolution of a city over time -- pretty great technology, bad football team and all.
New Scientist writes that you can see the city of Atlanta change in four dimensions.
So far, the team has only modeled Downtown Atlanta by scanning
historical photos and then lets some software animate and render the image.
This application will be useful for architects, historians or
town planners and the team of scientists already has plans to model other cities.
The Team:
The software has been developed at Georgia Tech by Frank Dellaert and Grant Schindler, with the help of Sing Bing Kang of Microsoft Research.

The team is currently working on “a small 4D-pilot project centered
around the Candler building in Downtown Atlanta, which is the
trapezoid-shaped building at the center of the map above, using
Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API” (Credit: Georgia Tech).
An interactive
version of this map is available from the 4D Cities website by clicking on the “4D-Atlanta” link. And here is a link to a larger, standalone map
where you can choose between 3 kinds of interactive views (road, aerial
and bird’s eye) — and have lots of fun (especially if you know Atlanta).
Here is how they introduce the project on the 4D Cities home page.
“The research described here aims at building time-varying 3D models
that can serve to pull together large collections of images pertaining
to the appearance, evolution, and events surrounding one place or
artifact over time, as exemplified by the 4D Cities project: the
completely automatic construction of a 4D database showing the
evolution over time of a single city.”
Now, let’s return to the New Scientist article for additional details.
To create a model of Atlanta, the researchers scanned in
numerous historical photos of the city that had been snapped from
similar vantage points. The software is designed to identify the 3D
structures within the image and break them down into a series of
points. It then compares the view in each one to work out why some of
these points are visible in some of the images but not others. Was the
building simply out of shot? Or was the view of one building blocked by
another? “If we can rule out those two possibilities, then we know that
the reason we don’t see a building is because it didn’t exist when the
image was taken. Either it was not yet built or it had already been
demolished,” says Schindler.
For more information about this project, you should read the talk that Frank Dellaert gave at the 3rd International Symposium on 3D Data Processing, Visualization & Transmission 2006 (3DPVT 2006) (PDF format, 30 pages, 8.32 MB). You also should read a paper named “Inferring Temporal Order of Images From 3D Structure”
(PDF format, 7 pages, 1.78 MB), which was presented at the IEEE
Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2007).
Sources: Paul Marks, New Scientist Magazine issue 2610, June 27, 2007; and various websites
They don't have Reggie Ball anymore, but look for Sean Bailey and company to lay it on em' again come November. Go Dawgs!