Happy New Year! 3 weeks to go before the start of the 2016 UVa Saturday Enrichment Series and I'm putting the finishing touches on "how it works" part of my lesson plan. Today, dedicated several hours to putting 123D Catch through its paces and overall, was pleased with how it works and what I was able to create knowing very little about the application. It's a free app, so watch for glitchy stuff (I did read on a user board that on public computing networks, 123D Catch access can be an issue, so we'll see how it works on the UVa computers?). In general, the 3D editor is a download to your PC, but actual work in it has to be processed on the 123D Catch server (they call it "the cloud"), so that always adds an element of unpredictability. Overall, I found the video tutorials they post on the home page very helpful and in about 1 hr, was able to create this short animation from a 3D file I created from 38 photos I uploaded from my phone of my little elephant. It takes a fair amount of data management planning, though, so be prepared. I used DropBox synched from my phone to my PC to speed up the download of all the picture versions required. Uploading and processing them from your PC to 123D Catch editor takes about 30 minutes (maybe faster if you have better upload internet speed than I do!). And, I found the upload to Youtube didn't work for  me? Even using an external screen capture? So, can't tell if this is an account or file issue, but finally, I was able to upload to Youtube exporting as mp4 file and manually uploading directly from PC to Youtube.

Converting photos to 3D files is a small part of our 3D SEP lesson plan, but I'm looking forward to playing around with it with the class to see what turns out ;)