Software I’d Like to See: Fotōpic

It makes no difference that I’ve been a computer programmer for nearly 30 years now. There are computer programmers and there are computer programmers. If your assignments (actual or potential) don’t require you to use a given technology, chances are you’ll never learn that technology. Meanwhile, the world passes you by in the form of all the folks (generally younger) who can make the technology sing.

Still, it’s nice to fantasize about the sort of project you’d like to work on, someday, if you only knew enough…

In Merry-Go-Round, I did this with a few wholly imaginary (as far as I know) pieces of software. Of these, the one I like the most is called Fotōpic. In the passage which follows, Fotōpic’s general nature is explained, and one character is shown using it.

Background: The character in this passage, Abbie, is on a mission on behalf of an underground/resistance movement which goes by the name of ACME Universal. Her mission: travel by train one night to the (fictional) town of Jessup’s Cut, Maryland, where she will make contact with a man whose description she knows, but whom she has never met.

There’s one problem: Abbie needs to get to Jessup’s Cut, make the contact, and get out of Jessup’s Cut as fast as possible. But she’s never been there, and she can’t go in advance. How’s she going to navigate her way around a town’s building, trees, streets, street lamps, obstacles which a GPS unit or satellite photos won’t help her with?

Here goes. From Merry-Go-Round:

The train had been almost empty, this far out on the line and well past rush hour. Thus, without blocking anyone and drawing attention, Abbie could ascend by herself the stairway which exited the station, and then stop and close her eyes as she came within a half-dozen steps of street level: stop, close her eyes, and picture the scene she’d committed to memory after viewing and reviewing and re-reviewing it on the screen of her [computer] back in Room 316.

No one in ACME’s Pico branch had any first-hand knowledge of Jessup’s Cut. [...] A couple of part-timers on the ACME margins offered what information they could, but it wouldn’t be enough simply to know that Street X intersected with Street Y.

Somehow, the main player, Abbie, would need to see the town herself, without risking being seen there in a practice run.

So the ACME software deities had rummaged through the ACME archives and other trusted online software sources. There, they found a program called Fotōpic.

Based on software used by artillery batteries, it had been developed by a couple of ex-military people, tweaked by dozens of others since. The idea was simple in practice (although, Abbie didn’t doubt, much more complex to implement): given enough photographs or fairly high-resolution drawings — even paintings — of a scene, and given knowledge of the approximate altitude, azimuth, and range from which a number of common points (rooflines, chimneys, antennas, windows, fire escapes, walls, and doors) are observed, you can create a three-dimensional graphic representation of the scene.

The quality of the 3D image varied, naturally, depending on the quality of the input images themselves, how many such images there were, how much you knew about the observer’s position, and so on. Thus for years Fotōpic had been just a novelty program — fun to use but not that effective as a real tool. There just wasn’t enough data, to feed it, often enough.

Then along came the State, with all its electronic surveillance schemes… and, equally important, all its confidence that the data from those schemes wouldn’t be particularly useful to anyone else.

Thanks to that confidence, all that data just lay around in the open, piled up on general-purpose servers and unprotected FTP hosts: satellite imagery and GPS waypoints, video streams from multiple angles, even (eventually) the signals from peevie trackers — all of it could be fed into Fotōpic.

There was too much data from too many scenes to be stored anywhere permanently, but you could fairly easily set four bounding points by latitude and longitude, fire up a Fotōpic session, and go out for coffee. When you got back to your keyboard, there on-screen would be your rotatable, zoomable model, as precisely rendered as you wanted it and as the available data allowed. You could even adjust the ambient light to approximate how the scene would look at different times of day — bright or dark or anywhere in between, shadows cast this way or that.

So what Abbie was seeing there behind her eyelids, as she stood two meters below street level at the ‘rail station in Jessup’s Cut, was a mental replay of the Fotōpic imagery of the same scene, from street level, at that latitude and longitude and facing in the same direction, at ten o’clock at night and that time of year.

She would come to the top step, she knew, and straight ahead would be a small park with swings and a sliding board and even a little merry-go-round, kid-driven in daylight but dark and still right now.

Fifty meters northwest of where she’d be standing, at a diagonal sliced across the park and on the far side of the street, there would be a JonesNode [Internet cafe], open for business until eleven.

And although Fotōpic didn’t show interiors, she knew that inside the cafe, at a large side table with his back to the front window, would sit a large man with a shaved head, wearing nondescript clothing, eating a chicken salad sandwich, and answering — tonight — to the name Henry (with the “r” rolling off the tongue to make it three syllables, like hen-er-y).

Her eyes still closed, Abbie mounted the remaining stairs, her hand on the railing. When she felt the railing run out she knew she was there, and opened her eyes.

The Fotōpic image she’d been seeing wobbled, shimmering, into place. Lines solidified into corners. Shadowy green blobs suspended in midair coalesced into broadleaf trees, and regularly spaced, glowing rose-and-yellow dots into sodium-vapor streetlights. The hollow outlines of playground equipment suddenly filled with substance, like a magician’s empty glass. Off to her left and fifty meters distant, the word “JonesNode,” presented in the generic Monterey font which Fotōpic used for anything like hand-written script, collapsed inwardly into a legible but freeform whirl of neon.

No doubt, there’s something like a real Fotōpic somewhere out there — probably a DoD laboratory of some sort. The odds of my seeing it are vanishingly small. But I’d accept an invitation to do so, in a heartbeat. (The image at the top of this post, obviously, is not a real Fotōpic screen capture.)

BTW: You might wonder where the name “Fotōpic” came from — why the weird little ō instead of a plain old o? This seems a characteristically geeky touch, especially for software developed by a whole community of open-source programmers. (If you’re a native English speaker, you probably didn’t think to question the initial F, since it’s a gimmick which Real Marketers employ for pretty much the same reason.) Furthermore, consider the macron, which is the term for the “¯” symbol over the o. Note that its presence here makes it very hard to misread the word as Fo-top-ic, as if the second o were a short one.

(And I will add a fact probably of use to pretty much no one else: getting the damn ō to work in a WordPress blog post is not a task for the weak-hearted.)