Has anyone looked at the Autodesk labs demonstration software that creates point clouds and meshes from a set of digital photos? Very cool stuff.
Yes - Very impressive. It may not be as accurate a point cloud survey, but to be able to simply take a few photos and get a rough and ready survey for feasibility purposes is very useful. I saw this demonstrated to quickly surveying existing buildings in conjunction with the vasari toolset to roughly evaluate the performace of the building, so that early decisions can be made to best spend capital on uplifting the performace of building stock.
It might be not as good as the software of A-D, but do you know this (manual) open source alternative. It helped me a few times.
Bentley just showed their version @ the BE Conf. in Philadelphia - not sure when this will make it into production software.
Kinda hard to tell if photogrammetry was used to build the bridge or just place it in 'augmented reality' mode.
Working on a refurb at the moment. Speaking to our dimenisonal surveyors, they seem to be staying clear of point clouds because of the amount of information that needs to be handled.
The thing I miss is the photographic materila that should accommpany the CAD survey info. A lot of times, no one can recall what exactly was surveyed. Structure? Finishes? Something inbetween like screed?
Something like MS' PhotoSynth would be great. There seems to be a lot of steam behind this at the moment.