When I first opened the TED talk video, I was complaining about the quality of the video. I had not paid attention to the time of the talk and didn’t realize that 2d-making-3d technology has already existed since 2007. The insight into the challenge that images-based VR takes years to its development is that I think in 2007, the technology or the basic theory of 3d visualization of 2d images were mature. As we can see, there was good work in 2007. But the challenge at that time, as I think, should be the image collection. Firstly, the 4G network was not available in 2007, which result in the fact that it would take a long time to collect 2d images of one object on the Internet. Besides, the source of image may be untrustworthy. For example, as the video shows, one of the images the system of Photosynth chooses is a poster image but not an image of the real thing. That increases the difficulty of computation.
After checking the works of the team members of Photosynth, I find out that most members still keep exploring the image-related industry. Following through the releasing time of papers, I realize that their focuses have already shifted from theory in the past to application nowadays. The reason why I think they are still sticking out to the image-based industry is that the fundamental logic of the image-based industry has not changed. With the development of high-speed network and computing hardware, the difficulties of development are not as huge as they used to be. Also, the tech of machine learning can be a great help to analyze the image data so as to guarantee a good quality of materials.
The reason why some people quit, as I think, is that they cannot follow the trend and refreshment of media and industry. In 2007, as the video shows, Photosynth is based on computers. In recent years, after checking the topics that same group of people is working on recently, the image-based industry has already evolved to be more diverse: VR, smartphones, the Internet are new filed. People who quit might fail to follow the trend.