Imagine taking a single photograph of an object and being able to bring that lonely image into editing software that would allow you to turn the object around 360°, revealing all its sides which the camera never even saw. Software that would let you take a single picture (just one frame) of an origami bird and still allow you to turn the bird around, flip it over, even animate it as though you had many photos of the bird from every angle….

Sounds pretty cool, right? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University thought so, too.  The researchers are actually working on a piece software that will allow us to isolate certain objects in our photographs and apply some wicked 3D manipulations to them. And, as it turns out, they are already doing some really cool photo edits with it.

But, how do they do it? Check out this quick video clip for an inside look of the software at work (spoiler alert: the camera doesn’t actually see the unseen…)[Read More…]