Autodesk’s Project Photofly Turns Photos into 3D

Similar to Strata’s Foto3D CX2 project, Autodesk has a new beta-project code-named ‘Project Photofly‘ that allows you to upload a collection of photos to their cloud, and then download a resulting DWG of the model.

The Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly is a small application that you download and install on your Windows computer. This application allows you to submit your photographs to the Project Photofly servers and view the Photo Scenes returned by the Project Photofly servers. You can save a Photo Scene in its native format, RZI (Autodesk ImageModeler 2009 format), or export the scene to the DWG file format.

It looks pretty impressive, and another example of doing work ‘in the cloud’, and frankly one of the more impressive ones I’ve seen.  Project Photofly is currently operational, and they aim to keep it in production until August 1st, 2011.  They’ve got a few tutorial and customer testimonials online already.  See one below, then go try it out yourself (if you use a Windows machine, that is).

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .