Photogrammetry
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Photogrammetry does not sound exceptionally exciting, when boiled down to “the science of taking measurements from photography.” It does not even sound that different from how our eyes work in order to have depth perception-- recognizing a common point from between two perspectives and calculating its location.This has practiced nearly as long as photography itself existed and is a fundamental component of orthographic maps based on aerial photography when surveyors could not quite achieve the same goal. Though those uses may be impressive in their own ways, where things really become of interest is the promise of how this technology might evolve as people increasingly have the means to take and process photography.
There are very flashy tech demos demonstrating the technology and some adjacent concepts as early as 2007, such as Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ TEDTalk. One example taking the familiar and re-presenting it in different contexts was the full text of the Charles Dickens novel ,Bleak House, as a series of columns of text that could be presented onscreen as an illegible abstract series of columns (which would eventually take off as a whole subgenre of literary themed art and T-shirts (Litographs, n.d.)) or be zoomed in until individual letters filled the screen. As he deprecatingly noted however, “Maybe this is an artificial way to read an e-book. I wouldn't recommend it.”(Agüera y Arcas, 2007) Where this becomes of interest however, is the notion of trying to reconstruct the physical world in a virtual space. While this most famously goes on with the Google Earth project and Ground Truth initiative, Microsoft presented a variation in 2010 where layperson visual geospatial media would be integrated into the primary map. In practice however, it seems like this project has since been depreciated, if it were ever fully integrated in the first place.
One potential barrier was the nature of the data, which comes from numerous individuals and may be difficult to actually parse into any meaningful context in a methodologically sound manner. Nevertheless, shortly after the technology was made apparent to the world, there were efforts to deal with the potential hang-ups inherent to pulling data from a diverse range of users. As is to be expected from a range of cameras and the fact the photos were often taken with no greater project in mind, the photos themselves may be of varying conditions, quality, lighting, resolution, focal length, etc. with little detail about the devices that took them in the first place (Snavely, Seitz, & Szeliski, 2008, p. 2). What set this project apart from smaller scale projects of the same principle with simpler datasets is largely an advance in computer vision technologies that can better account for these factors (Ibid). Likewise, there were advances in image browsing/retrieval/annotation that enabled the project to go forward, especially as standardized metadata became a greater concern on everyone’s mind (Snavely, Seitz, & Szeliski, 2006, p. 3). However, is that even when people do actively try to contribute to a greater collective knowledge, they may not do so in a way that aligns with a researcher’s expectations or algorithms (e.g. the variance inherent to tagging systems (Spyrou & Mylonas, 2016)) which would make it more difficult to engage with the available media.
This seems to call into question some degree whether or not user-generated content is treated on the same level as “official” resources however, be they Bing Streetside or Google StreetView. On the one hand, this seems like a reasonable approach to depreciate their information. Even assuming that users fully understand what they agree to by placing their information online, simply because they consented on one front does not mean they meant to do so in all contexts. Though privacy in the US runs with the “reasonable expectation” test as precedent, (Stewart, 1967), this does not reflect the experience of teenagers who grew up with drastically different understandings of privacy than generations before them. By necessity to engage with others they may participate in social networks, but still not intend for it to be consumed by the general public. (Marwick & boyd, 2014, p. 1052). This particularly comes up in academic analyses of big data such as raised by danah boyd (sic), another Microsoft employee (in the Research division), who specializes in the emerging field of data and society. Noting “just because it is accessible doesn’t make it ethical,” (boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 18), she raises various concerns about the data provenance over time. Simply because they researchers thought they anonymized sources that does not mean that others were unable to reverse-engineer the publicly available data, and there could be unforeseen consequences for the individuals who did not give explicit consent and may be presented out of context. (boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 18). Likewise, there are communities where individuals might have to reach out online to engage with others but want to maintain clear in-group/out-group barriers for their own protection. (For example, the extreme body modification “community” which fears potential legal/social consequences frequently faces internal conflict between making information available for new members or those who fear giving away too much. (Lingel & boyd, 2013, p. 8)).
On the complete other side, it could be perceived as unfair to engage with people’s workproduct without giving them credit. In the event one participant in a project makes an exceptionally noteworthy contribution, it seems as though it would be unfair to build upon it without attribution. This even happens in communal projects amongst young internet users (predominantly 8-17) on an online programming/remix community/platform, where they are encouraged to build upon and remix others’ works. While a computer automatically provided attribution, there was still a different perception for the manual crediting of other’s works, which suggested a greater level of thoughtfulness (Monroy-Hernández, Hill, Gonzalez-Rivero, & others, 2011).
There seems to be less academic literature about where the projects in question currently stand. One issue is that branding makes this a very muddled topic. Just as the product known as Microsoft Surface was once a $10,000 table –sized touchscreen and eventually was replaced with a handheld tablet/laptop/whatever device (Pepitone, 2012), there have been various iterations of Photosynth (“Photosynth - Capture your world in 3D.,” n.d.). The end product in question now varies between collective 3D models, individual generated paths, and individual photospheres from a retired mobile app (“Photosynth mobile apps are being retired - Announcements - Forums - Photosynth,” 2015). Even though the current prioritized technology is no longer immediately available on everyone’s mobile devices, it remains to see how many of these might eventually go on to widespread use, especially with emerging and tangentially related technologies like the Hololens.
Works cited:
Agüera y Arcas, B. (2007). How PhotoSynth can connect the world’s images. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth?language=en
boyd, danah, & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679.
Lingel, J., & boyd, danah. (2013). “Keep it secret, keep it safe”: Information poverty, information norms, and stigma. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(5), 981–991. http://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22800
Litographs. (n.d.). Created from the text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Retrieved March 15, 2016, from http://www.litographs.com/products/alice
Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2014). Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media. New Media & Society, 16(7), 1051–1067. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814543995
Monroy-Hernández, A., Hill, B. M., Gonzalez-Rivero, J., & others. (2011). Computers can’t give credit: How automatic attribution falls short in an online remixing community. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3421–3430). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979452
Pepitone, J. (2012, June 19). Remember when “Microsoft Surface” was a bar table? Retrieved March 15, 2016, from http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/19/technology/microsoft-surface-table-pixelsense/index.htm
Photosynth - Capture your world in 3D. (n.d.). Retrieved March 15, 2016, from https://photosynth.net/
Photosynth mobile apps are being retired - Announcements - Forums - Photosynth. (2015, July 10). Retrieved March 15, 2016, from https://photosynth.net/discussion.aspx?cat=e57bdda7-ff98-40a1-b2ae-529b0213c2b8&dis=259bd2a2-28fe-49ec-b349-06c95173d435
Snavely, N., Seitz, S. M., & Szeliski, R. (2008). Modeling the World from Internet Photo Collections. International Journal of Computer Vision, 80(2), 189–210. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-007-0107-3
Spyrou, E., & Mylonas, P. (2016). Analyzing Flickr metadata to extract location-based information and semantically organize its photo content. Neurocomputing, 172, 114–133. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2014.12.104
Stewart, P. Katz v. United States, 389 US 347 (Supreme Court December 18, 1967).