
What would it be like to see pictures of moonwalkers, comic-book characters and painted portraits get up and walk right out of their frames? It’s an eerie thought – but Photo Wake-Up, a software application developed by computer scientists at the University of Washington and Facebook, gives you an idea how it would look.
And someday, the app could come to an augmented-reality headset near you.
The project has been in the works for months. It won a share of the spotlight last November at UW’s annual Madrona Prize competition, and made another media splash a month later when the team put out a preprint paper.
Next week, the researchers will be presenting their results at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Long Beach, Calif.