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Photofly Can Turn Your 2D Digital Photos into 3D Objects

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Photofly 2, a free piece of software from Autodesk, the company behind the ancient and illustrious AutoCAD software, can stitch standard digital photos into accurate 3D models. You don't need a fancy camera — a point-and-shoot is more than good enough — and by leveraging Autodesk's cloud computing cluster, you don't even need a powerful computer to use Photofly. 3D models can be created out of faces, static objects, interior rooms, and even external architecture. Best of all, though: Photofly 2 is free.

To use Photofly, you download a small tool (Windows-only for now), import your photos, and then simply send them off to the Project Photofly cloud servers. Presumably Autodesk wants to keep the actual 2D-to-3D process out of reach of reverse engineers, but presumably the process also requires a vast amount of computational power. Still, considering the software and the service are free, you can't complain. Once your images have been processed, the Photofly cloud returns a full 3D object that can be saved or exported to popular formats DWG or OBJ for further editing, or 3DP for 3D printing. Yes, if you own a 3D printer — and they're quickly coming down in price! — Photofly enables you to take photos of a human face, a vase, or a skyscraper, and then print it out. You can also view your models using Autodesk's free Inventor Publisher Mobile Viewer iOS app.

As for how Photofly works, Autodesk has been rather tight-lipped. The Photofly shooting guidelines video stipulates that you have to take a photo every 5 to 10 degrees around an object, for a total of about 50 images, but beyond that we can only make educated guesses. Photofly will first need to work out the position of the camera in each photo, which can be triangulated from comparing and contrasting photos. Photofly will then have to "look" at nearby images to create a stereogram, much like our own eyes — and from there, it can use pixel-level analysis to create a highly-detailed 3D mesh.

Finally, it should be noted that Photofly 2 won't be freely available until next week — and there's also no mention of whether it will remain free, or whether it will be rolled into one of Autodesk's commercial products. Still, if you've ever wanted to make a 3D model of your face or house, now's your chance. You could even use it to make a 3D model of your entire body, either for educational purposes, or as a gift to your significant other.

Read more at Technology Review, or download Photofly from Autodesk