VideoTrace - interactivity and real images rule!

Some days ago I was talking with a friend (Finn) about the fact that in many cases IT is used to represent lists of items that exist in reality (e.g. a storage house becomes a database), and a big effort is spent to keep the representation and the real items aligned (e.g. everytime you move an product in our storage house, you need to tell you database and viceversa).

Now if reality is already there, why spending so much time mapping it and then keeping map and reality aligned? In many cases a rough representation, frequently updated in a stupid, automatic way, could be more than enough...

For example: suppose I want to play around with the furnitures of a room, see if they look better in another configuration, then perhaps move them for real.
What should I do? Star measuring, learn how to use a simple CAD and make an accurate 3D model of the whole room, and of all the furnitures?
Wouldn't it be more fun (and quicker) to simply take a picture of the room from 2 or 3 different angles, and use a 2D editor to fake it: move furnitures around by cut-paste them in 2D and reshaping them a bit with some perspective transforms??

Sure the effect would not be perfect, but it would be quick and give me a rough idea...

In the spirit of this "reality-fist" concept of IT, I've found this incredible program:
VideoTrace

It is terrific, just look at their demo video!



More stuff about reality-first IT, to come :D