Creating 3-dimensional worlds and objects from flat 2-dimensional photographs isn’t a new concept. It’s been happening for years. In the early days (and still often, today), we used photographs inside 3D modelling software as reference images for our 3D creations. A few years pass and along comes photogrammetry, allowing the automatic creation of 3D models and scenes from a couple of hundred photos.

Photogrammetry often takes hours, but this new tech from NVIDIA can do it in seconds. And you don’t need hundreds of images in order to do it, either. Just a few dozen. The tech demo above illustrates the principle where NVIDIA reproduces an iconic image of Andy Warhol shooting a Polaroid camera and with just a relatively handful of images, it gets turned into a 3D scene with a virtual camera that can fly around it with ease.

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