Like something out of a hokey sci-fi movie, Oddviz’s use of photogrammetry gives astonishing navigable 3D scans of real buildings.

There’s a scene in 2008’s The Dark Knight, where a desperate Batman turns to desperate measure to capture the Joker. By hijacking all of the the cell phones in Gotham City, the Caped Crusader creates a glorified 3D imaging network in an effort to hunt his quarry. That’s what comes to mind, when we first caught site of this astounding 3D scan by Istanbul-based media company Oddviz.

Unlike Bat’s city-scan however, Oddviz’s photogrammetry scan won’t result in Morgan Freeman talking your ear off about how unethical the whole thing is. Rather, it’ll leave you with a strong case of the how-the-heck-did-they-do-thats.

Superficial visual similarities aside, Oddviz’s simply titled Hotel visualization uses vastly different techniques to Batman’s.

Leveraging photogrammetry techniques to build a full image of the Sofa Hotel in the company’s native Istanbul, the resulting composite is not unlike an MRI scan. Allowing you to push through facades and boundaries into the internal spaces, it’s a trippy, kaleidoscopic view that is indescribably cool.

How Oddviz Recreated the Sofa Hotel

The remarkable thing about Oddviz’s model of the hotel is that it is comprised entirely from photographs. There is no CGI trickery going on, just lots and lots of photographs. Almost 10,000, to be (nearly) precise.

The technique the studio relies upon for this particular model is photogrammetry. Basically, the use of photography to ascertain the size and distance of objects and structures. Using the photography alongside the hotel’s blueprints, Oddviz maps the textures given by the photographs into a 3D space.

That alone sounds impressive enough. But the resulting 3D model gives an oddly satisfying and otherwise utterly impossible viewpoint of the hotel. Scything through layer after layer much as one would with medical scans, the hotel falls away to reveal diorama-like detail within.

Source: Sploid