November 30, 2010 2 Comments A friend brought this to my attention as he happened to know of my interest in urban cultural heritage and mobile augmented reality for the #ededc final assignment. This is a project at the University of North Carolina that essentially is using openly available Flickr photos to “build” highly complex 3D cities in an automated fashion. Using millions of images and a single personal computer, the algorithm can essentially build one of these sophisticated models in under a day. In this instance, Rome is built with only freely accessible Flickr images (over a million of them). According to the article in ReadWriteWeb (fantastic site, by the way), which is quoting the lead researcher Jan-Michael Frahm: “Our technique would be the equivalent of processing a stack of photos as high as the 828-meter Dubai Towers, using a single PC, versus the next best technique, which is the equivalent of processing a stack of photos 42 meters tall – as high as the ceiling of Notre Dame – using 62 PCs. This efficiency is essential if one is to fully utilize the billions of user-provided images continuously being uploaded to the Internet.” So, what does this mean for posthuman, cyborg, or any other pedagogies? As far as I am concerned, it extends the perception of the (post)human, allowing for complicated representations to be crafted based on a mixture of want and need (I want to see a rendering of Paris) and automated algorithms (now technology, go do that for me). Imagine a flaneur (as in literally wandering the streets) that never sets foot in the material city of investigation. Granted, a flaneur does that now for constructs and power dynamics, language, and so forth, but this is a good step forward for spatial studies, especially those only liminally related to science (more Humanities based fields). You could add further layers of context to this image construct. It is basically a step towards virtual systems that can not only represent, but mediate to some degree of completeness the affect of humans. We are in this stage of technology and crowd participation where we are fascinated with just getting it out there, connecting, looking, pondering. This is the next phase, the construction of complex systems to mirror the governing dynamics of communities.