3D Animated Landscapes from 2D Images

It's funny how things in academia are rarely ever heard about even if they are incredibly novel and interesting. I think it's because of their limited application, especially in the artistic rendering world. (Of course, it also includes the inability of most academics to commercialize so they rarely make it to press.)

A master's thesis from 2001 describes a wonderful way of animating Chinese landscape paintings and panoramas in order to create a three-dimensional walk through. Their method uses image based modeling and rendering (IBMR) and improves on a previous method called Tour in Picture (TIP). Their method is multi-perspective TIP and fixes many of the disadvantages of regular TIP. The main disadvantage of regular TIP was the short animation times. With multi-perspective TIP the animation times can be much larger. In fact, TIP animations were generally ten seconds in length but the animation on their research page is one minute and thirty seconds. (IBMR is not one of my areas of interest so I'm unable to summarize their method but they have very pretty results.)

I highly recommend you check out their video section. They really are able to create pseudo three-dimensional models of the scene that can be walked into (ie: they have depth) and through.