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back to article Drone-assisted Swiss construct virtual 3D castle

Those readers with a penchant for castles but a disinclination to visit Switzerland can enjoy a virtual shufti Château de Chillon, thanks to UAV image processing software outfit Pix4D. A view of the virtual 3D Chillon Castle In half a day, the company snapped "6,200 aerial and terrestrial images using DJI Phantom 2 Vision …

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  1. Christoph

    Switzerland’s most visited historic monument

    Not any more? Will people not bother to visit when they can tour it remotely?

    Or possibly visitor numbers might increase, to view the real thing after doing a remote tour?

    I hope someone will be doing a detailed look at the numbers to check what actually happens.

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  2. NorthernCoder
    Facepalm

    What?

    No 3D-printed model?

    Swedish Spotscale has a similar idea:

    http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/it_telekom/allmant/article3822333.ece (article in Swedish, take a look at the pictures for a general idea).

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  3. Ralph B

    Cute, but ...

    Why does the navigation on these 3D things always have to be so shitty? One slightest touch of a direction key or mouse and you're suddenly outside the underside of the object, upside-down and pointing in the wrong direction. And it's gonna take a good 10 minutes of work to get a normal-ish view back again.

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    1. Roger Varley
      Reply Icon

      Re: Cute, but ...

      I still haven't managed to get "inside" the building yet :(

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      1. Stevie
        Reply Icon

        Re: I still haven't managed to get "inside" the building yet

        This is because far from being made from the real thing scanned in situ by expensive drone overflights, the 3D model was actually made from a scan of a Lilliput Lane miniature of the castle while it sat on the project lead's mum's dining room table.

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  4. Lionel Baden
    Thumb Up

    umm

    How do we get this into counterstrike :)

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  5. harmjschoonhoven

    Re: Euro 6,500 for the software

    and the Swiss will also charge you CHF 12.50 p.p. for entry to the castle.

    The ticket office https://maps.google.ch/maps?q=Chillon&hl=de&ll=46.414135,6.927679&spn=0.001397,0.001725&sll=46.362093,9.036255&sspn=4.048684,7.064209&oq=chiilon&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=46.414323,6.927944&panoid=uk3RISu5fpUtobWCD6oEbA&cbp=12,183.92,,2,1.87 is discretely kept out of the 3D view.

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  6. thomaskwscott

    Ultra Realistic 3D Games

    We're not far from the days when to create COD or Battlefield maps it will be cheaper and easier to build them and film them than to model them. Takes realism to a whole new level...

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    1. Horridbloke
      Reply Icon

      Re: Ultra Realistic 3D Games

      Google Earth Deathmatch perhaps?

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    2. Naughtyhorse
      Reply Icon

      Re:you think?

      100 million points for a fairly low res model of a single building?

      standard file format for this sorta fing uses about 40 chrs per point

      so thats 1/2 a gig per building.....

      Sure you can compress it, but that just increases processor load at runtime.

      that means the next CoD will come on about 150 dvd's!

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    6.5K isn't that much considering what it does

    There's probably half a dozen Phd dissertations worth of maths inside the code so to me it doesn't seem too unreasonable especially given the quite limited market for it - ie its not really a general consumer product.

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    1. Crazy Operations Guy
      Reply Icon

      Re: 6.5K isn't that much considering what it does

      I can see this being picked up a Real Estate company, in fact I am hoping to see realtors using this.

      I am getting tired of all the slide shows of a few crappy photos that give you no idea how the house is actually laid out and what it looks like. With some work on the drones, it would be fairly trivial for an agent to pull two drones out of the trunk of their car, turn on a laptop and let the drones go about their business.

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      1. Martin Budden Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: 6.5K isn't that much considering what it does

        In fact right now realtors could be doing a one-minute flight around the outside of a property with one drone, then uploading the video directly to their website. This would be useful.

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  8. Frumious Bandersnatch

    have a look at insight3d

    For a free system for stitching the photos together and producing the 3d point cloud. As far as I know it doesn't use telemetry data (such as location and angle of the camera when the shot was taken) to stitch together the various photos. Also doesn't come with drones.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: have a look at insight3d

      Very impressive - but the end result looks a bit rough in comparison and I don't see how it would cope with modelling interior spaces.

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      1. Holtsmark Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Go

        Re: have a look at insight3d

        Or try Point Cloud Library : http://pointclouds.org/

        Have played around with it myself, and was suitably impressed.

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  9. marky_boi
    Thumb Down

    Preferred the real thing

    nothing replaces the real deal. This was useful to refresh my memory from a visit 9 yrs ago...That's about it.... yawn

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    1. Khaptain Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Preferred the real thing

      Try telling that to all the Interwebby pRon users..... Some of them might have been lucky enough to have had a little taste 9 years ago.....since then they are more than happy with just the images (vids).

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    potter

    Are you sure that's not Hogwarts?

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  11. Zot

    Nothing new here

    In fact it feels like an embedded advert.

    I like the sketchfab view, so there's a nice polygon making algorithm in there somewhere.

    But did they consider using Euclideon's Geoverse to render the point clouds?

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  12. Stevie

    Bah!

    I call shenanigans! I recognize this from watching David McCallum trying to avoid the ze eagle eye of Anthony Valentine in it in the grim years of Hitler's supremacy ('72 to '74).

    It's Colditz Castle, notorious prison for incorrigible escapers and other verdammt pigdog scum.

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  13. Naughtyhorse

    kinda basic.

    93 million points seems a bit over the top.

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  14. Naughtyhorse

    yawn

    autodesk and micro$oft have cloud apps that do this, and have had for donkeys

    and both about 6 and a half grand cheaper than this clone

    http://photosynth.net/

    http://www.123dapp.com/catch

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  15. jukejoint

    Disappointed. Was hoping to catch a glimpse of the Prisoner. I didn't get inside though, and rumor has it he's not keen to leave anymore.

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  16. Karl Lattimer

    VisualSFM and more

    http://www.qdh.org.uk/wordpress/?p=116

    You can do all of this for free, there's a video of a reconstruction I did on a church with roughly 700 photographs taken with a EOS20D (I even had to half the resolution of them to get them to fit in memory) in the above blog post, there's also instructions on how to do this.

    Anyway, if you want advice on how not to spend a few grand on doing something which is, actually pretty easy comment on the blog :)

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