3-d Imaging Breakthrough

• “PhotoTudes is going to change the face of e-commerce,” says Victor Ciccarelli, CEO of CQAdvan-tage. “E-commerce companies can now offer their customers a full, interactive, three-dimensional view of their product for about the same price and effort as offering them a flat, 2-D view.”
  
  While 3-D product photography is obviously an advantage for e-commerce, the prohibitive costs and labor associated with it has made it rare in Web retailing. Almost all those additional costs are due to the mountain of photo retouching tasks resulting from the long time it takes to snap all the pictures making up the 3-D image – over 10 minutes. These long shooting times also make it difficult to shoot large or living objects. 3-D imaging, for this reason, has largely been limited to small, lifeless objects that can fit on a table.
  
  Using a computer-controlled array of 17 cameras and a turntable, the PhotoTudes studio can generate three-dimensional pictures with up to 173 images and stitch them together in less than 30 seconds, significantly faster than the next fastest system. Not only does this almost totally eliminate the huge retouching tasks associated with 3-D photography, it also allows photographers a wider range of subjects, such as people.
  
  “I know of no-one else who can do this work as fast or as inexpensively as PhotoTudes,” adds Ciccarelli. “And I know of no-one else who has a system that can shoot things larger than a table-top item, things like people, furniture, and cars, without a mountain of expensive photo retouching.”
  
  The PhotoTudes offers complete studio-to-Web services for 3-D photography, including preparation, models, and photography, as well as creating and hosting Flash movies and animated images for the Web. The studio can shoot products as small as three inches and as large as an SUV.
  
  Ciccarelli sees a future for PhotoTudes far beyond Web retailing. Retailers can install kiosks in a store and present broader merchandise lines beyond what is on the shelves, without additional inventory and shrinkage costs. Trade show presenters, who typically lug hundreds or thousands of products around to trade shows, can bring CDs with 3-D images and significantly cut down on the physical products they actually bring to shows.
  
  Phototudes is a division of CQAdvantage, a full-service technology, photography, and Web technology consulting and firm. With more than ten years experience in software production, advanced litigation support, document management, software creation, as well as state-of-the art professional photography and videography solutions, CQAdvantage stands as an innovation leader in technology-mediated information and communications management.