Analogue Hackers

Hacking lies at the heart of free software, since hackers are people who love fiddling and fixing (and not to be confused with crackers who like break and steal). How about this for a group of analogue hackers? The Parisian "Untergunther":

whose members include architects and historians, rebuilt an abandoned 100-year-old French government bunker and renovated a 12th-century crypt, he said. They claim to be motivated by a desire to preserve Paris’s heritage.

Last year the Untergunther spent months hidden in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France’s greatest citizens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slipping in at closing time every evening – French television said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.

(Via Boing Boing.)

The 3D Digital Commons as Metaphor

A few months back I wrote about a video showing an intriguing project that built on the commons of public images posted to Flickr and the rest. By patching these together it was possible to recreate full, 3D representations of public spaces.

There's now a site with more info about this, as well as a paper on the subject:

With the recent rise in popularity of Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr and Google, community photo collections (CPCs) have emerged as a powerful new type of image dataset. For example, a search for “Notre Dame Paris” on Flickr yields more than 50,000 images showing the cathedral from myriad viewpoints and appearance conditions. This kind of data presents a singular opportunity: to reconstruct the world’s geometry using the largest known, most diverse, and largely untapped, multi-view stereo dataset ever assembled. What makes the dataset unusual is not only its size, but the fact tha it has been captured “in the wild”—not in the laboratory—leading to a set of fundamental new challenges in multi-view stereo research.

What's striking about this research - aside from the results, which are pretty dramatic - is that it provides a perfect metaphor for the benefit of pooling digital resources to create a commons. In this case, 2D pictures, many of limited value in themselves, are patched together to create an astonishingly detailed 3D representation of places that goes far beyond any single shot. And the more photos that are added, the richer that commons becomes. Exactly like all other digital commons.