Freeweb's Newest Product Fotowoosh Transforms Digital Images into 3D
Consumers, Local Businesses and Real Estate Companies Among Beneficiaries of Easy-to-Use Automated 3D Imaging Technology

SILVER SPRING, MD – April 19, 2007 – Fotowoosh, a free tool that automatically transforms standard 2D digital images of outdoor scenes into 3D images launched today as the latest functionality from Freewebs, the company dedicated to ensuring everyone in the world can unleash their creativity through multimedia websites and blogs (www.freewebs.com).

“For the first time, many outdoor digital images—whether inside Freewebs’ 17 million member community or anywhere on the web—can now be automatically converted into 3D,” said Shervin Pishevar, Freewebs President. “Fotowoosh will be widgetized to allow anyone—local businesses, real estate companies, everyday people—to publish and virally share user-generated 3D images anywhere on the web. Fotowoosh adds to Freewebs’ already extensive catalog of easy-to-use multimedia and website building tools.”

Fotowoosh (www.fotowoosh.com) automatically constructs simple "pop-up" 3D models, like those one would find in a children's book, out of a single outdoor image. Fotowoosh labels each region of an outdoor image as ground, vertical, or sky, providing the necessary information to determine where to "cut" and "fold" in the image. The model is then “popped up,” and the image overlayed onto the 3D model as a texture map. The procedure has been demonstrated to work on about a third of all photographs tested and further development is expected to improve the success rate.

The technology behind Fotowoosh was developed by Derek Hoiem, a PhD candidate in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and may ultimately lead to more capable computer vision for robotic vehicles and other automated systems. Hoiem collaborated on the invention with Alexei A. Efros and Martial Hebert, both faculty members and computer vision researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s famed Robotics Institute. Freewebs licensed the pop-up technology from Carnegie Mellon and Mr. Hoiem will be working with Freewebs continuing to improve the technology.

Enabling computers to understand the geometric context of 2D images had been an unsolved problem of artificial intelligence and one that had been largely abandoned for decades when the Carnegie Mellon researchers began their work several years ago. But, by applying new machine-learning techniques, they found they could teach computers to discern between horizontal and vertical planes in an image. That ability, combined with some common sense rules such as “the sky is at the top of photos,” made it possible for the computer program to determine the 3D composition of a scene.

One day soon the whole world will have a web presence, and Freewebs is dedicated to building an open platform where everyone in the world can easily express themselves online in any way they would like, for free, with no barriers—regardless of language, technology, socioeconomics, bandwidth, etc. Freewebs unleashes peoples’ creativity in a way no other site can by allowing users to centralize all their disparate web presences (blogs, websites, photo and video sharing) onto one, high-quality site—freeing them from the hassle of managing separate identities from multiple locations.

Please visit www.fotowoosh.com today to make and share your own 3D images.

About Freewebs.com
Freewebs, the company dedicated to ensuring everyone in the world can unleash their creativity through multimedia websites, forums and blogs. For everyone with an Internet connection and something to share, Freewebs provides the toolkit to express their voice on the web through its versatile publishing platform. To date, Freewebs members have created more than 17 million comprehensive websites including blogs, photos, videos, music, e-commerce and more. Founded in 2001, Freewebs is privately held and based in Silver Spring, MD.

Contact:
Jo McKenna
Freewebs
646.382.4291
jo@freewebs.com

Lane Buschel/Chris Macowski
The Mooris + King Company for Freewebs
212.561.7454 / 212.561.7459
lane.buschel@morris-king.com
chris.macowski@morris-king.com