Pop Up Photos!

Do you find that your photos are sooo... boring? Dull-looking and utterly meaningless? Then learn to compose better pictures, dumbass. In the meantime, clever engineers at Carnegie Mellon University have come up with something else you can do with your awful snapshots. Turn them into pop up photos!

That's right. They have devised a program that can turn your flat photo into 3D scenery. Automatically. Unfortunately, it is now at its beta phase, requiring Matlab libraries and stuff. And because I don't speak geek, I haven't figured out how to use this little gem yet. If you are a supertechnocrat, click here to download their program and show us how to use it!

Even if you are not a whiz-kid, their website contains an MP4 movie showing some 3D results of the program. Such as this Amtrak train here.







Which is ubercool to show off to your friends. I did.

You may not know this, but I am a great Blade Runner fan. This new program instantly reminds me of the Esper Machine in the movie, which is a device that decodes a flat photograph into a 3D scene. Allowing investigators to search for tiny clues hidden in the picture. Too bad the real version doesn't look around corners!

You know what else this reminds me of? Stephen Chow (周星驰) the King of Hong Kong "nonsense comedy" (无厘头 or Mo Lei Tau in Cantonese). Wha...dah??? Why him?

In one of his movies, his character comes across a porn magazine. He tries to look at an angle to see the boobs better, but it obviously doesn't work because it is a flat photo. Not at that time anyway.

Now with advanced computer technology, he can.

Sweet.