Provided

Left, A.D. White House. Right, a 3-D model of A.D. White House.

You don't have to be a basketball or hockey star to compete for Cornell. Over the next three weeks students at Cornell and the University of Washington will vie to see which school can build the most complete 3-D model of campus buildings.

Players can participate by taking photos of campus buildings and uploading them to the PhotoCity Web site at http://photocitygame.com/ or by submitting photos with an iPhone app available through the site. Software developed by Noah Snavely, Cornell assistant professor of computer science, and colleagues at the University of Washington will combine the still photos into 3-D models of buildings.

The winning school only gets glory, but the top player from each school will receive a trophy with the 3-D model of a building of their choice etched into it. Top players in several categories will receive a Flickr Pro account, and the top 10 players across the board will win T-shirts. Cornell is currently ahead on points and number of photos submitted. The competition runs through April 30.

"We're hoping that the 3-D models we build can be useful as a visualization of campus -- for instance, a layer on top of Google Earth -- so that you can take a photo-realistic virtual tour of campus," Snavely said. "The photographic data we're collecting is extremely useful for further research in computer vision and graphics applications, and we're hoping it will spur better algorithms for automatic 3-D reconstruction from images."

Versions of the game have been in progress for a while at each school, with local teams competing to "own" a building by submitting the most -- and most useful -- photos. The Web site shows current progress on the models of each building and where photos are needed to fill in the empty spaces. Models have been started for 31 Cornell buildings; players may "seed" new buildings by taking the first photos of them.

Beyond the competition, the PhotoCity Web site also links to models being built in several large U.S. cities and in Red Square in Moscow.