Online 2D to 3D conversion

Make a three-dimensional "fly around" model out of a plain 2D image with Make3D, a Stanford University service based on an algorithm created by Stanford students Andrew Ng, Ashutosh Saxena and Min Sun.

Make3D produces a 3D model gives viewers access to a picture's depth and range of points of view. Photos can be uploaded from users' hard disks or pulled into the site from Flickr.

Sign up for the service here or read a more detailed article on Make3D here.

Excerpts:

"The algorithm uses a variety of visual cues that humans use for estimating the 3-D aspects of a scene," said Ashutosh Saxena, a doctoral student in computer science who developed the Make3d website with Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science. "If we look at a grass field, we can see that the texture changes in a particular way as it becomes more distant."

...On the Make3d website, the algorithm puts images uploaded by users into a processing queue and will send an e-mail when the model has been rendered. Users can then vote on whether the model looks good, and can see an alternative rendering and even tinker with the model to fix what might not have been rendered right the first time...

Samples of resulting 3D models (vids):