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Using Lasers And Range Finders To Digitize Objects
esoteric0 writes: "Those boys at Stanford are at it again: They created some new algorithms for 'combining multiple range and color images, allow us to reliably and accurately digitize the external shape and surface characteristics of many physical objects.' " It's not just a mouthful -- they've created a cool digitized version of buildings, maps, and Michelangelo's David. Ever wonder what his toe looks like when digitized at .05mm?
Whoa! Did anyone else have a sudden flashback to Tron? I can almost see Michelangelos David in one of those glowing blue outfits.
-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
digitize certain young actres...and then release the data under an open source license...the possibilities are, shall I say, endless...
Yes! Finally I can get digitized and take on
Master Control myself! But really, this technology
has been around since 1977. Disney brings
us one of those excellent "historical documents"
refered to as Tron. There we see digitizing
people has been around for a lot longer then
some stafford punks would like us to believe.
Anyhow, I am off to suit up and get ready for
a cycle race or two and hopefully I can slam
my disc right through the MC. Remember, the
users have all the power!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Hmph. Let's email the picutes to HIM.
Of course, we all know what will end up being one of the primary uses of this technology: pr0n.
Sorry, that was the wrong link. Can't find the right one now, but believe me, it's funny.
Yea, Ars ran it. It's old enough to be #2 in the top row.
Ars Technica has a feature on this subject entitled: `Michelangelo Goes Digital'
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
Here it is: Something ate my child. Did I promise too much?
Buy it, then destroy it (or do whatever you damn please with it). Thank you.
Maybe this process would be useful in mapping extraterrestrial terrain. It might allow detailed analysis of a planet's surface from great distances.(?) I wonder if using a different frequency for the laser could cut (like X-rays) through thick, vaporous atmosphere allowing scientists to get data from hidden features on cloud-covered planets. This process has some interesting applications...
Their CMMs are for a completely different market though...more manufacturing oriented.
Well, this is certainly kind of cute, but isn't it just adding some sophistication to the process done by those companies (e.g. tomra) using lasers to scan things for pattern recognition? Just wondering, I'm not too into this kind of stuff... :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
The Univeristy of Mass. (Amherst) has been doing some cool stuff with 3D modeling of images too. Check it out.
Ascender II Project
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
The visual effects industry regularly makes models and puts them in a 3D scanner to get a basic mesh to work from. Also, the vfx industry regularly takes full lidar sweeps of outdoor sets to more easily do match-moves, make mattes, and such. For example, see: http://www.vfxpro.com/.getarticle/.772 954741 and http:/ /www.digitalpostproduction.com/Htm/Features/ScanMa ster/ScanMasters.htm
Heck, do a search for 3D scanner, and you come up with tons of hits...here's a couple:
So can someone please tell me what the big news is? Is is the resolution, I take it?...That IS pretty small and pretty cool...
While the intracasies of US copyright and intellectual property laws may be bad enough, as far as I can tell, this stuff would be covered under Italian law. While the actual legalese clause cited above is most likely a symptom of overactive paranoia, it is possible the project does have the rights it claims. Presumably, they might have recieved rights to this specific digital form of the pieces from their respective owners under Italian law (the museums involved, Michelangelo's relatives, etc.), or perhaps Italy has laws in place covering just such an eventuality.
While the point that this is silly is well taken, I don't quite think this is worthy of knee-jerk copyright paranoia or, say, a Jon Katz writeup, until more information comes to light.
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
Anna Kournikova
___
I've always wanted something that I could just walk around with, or mount on my car, that would just digitize everything I saw. Give it a GPS and link it to other units owned by other people, so eventually every piece of an entire city might be "Seen" by one of these critters, and it'd all be mapped on a central server farm. If all the devices can recognize corners and distance and stuff, and automatically break down the geometric primitives that make up our world, and assign the appropriate textures to them, we'd have...
Automatic Quake maps for every place you've ever been!
Not to mention, instant surveillance for the spooks. Forget taking a few pictures and trying to by-hand extrapolate where the secret passages in a building are. Just wander through it with a mapping briefcase, and in the resulting data look for unusually thick walls and stuff.
DUDE, IF MY WIFE EVER FINDS OUT I HAVE LOOKED THERE, SHE WILL KICK MY ASS.
Nice pictures, too bad it requires enabling the potentialy evil java to open them up.
Why do more and more people insist on using java for a simple link to a picture? To prevent a wget by a happy surfer? To play games? Me thinks a patch to wget for snarfing addresses out of javascript is in order so one could assemble a viewable page for one's own viewing with a simple browser.
Who here sees the story of Tron today as an oppressed Microsoft universe that is eventually freed by hurling that Linux install CD into the MCP?
you know it's comming soon. Just remember--reindeer flotilla!
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
This type of work (attempting to detect very small scale irregularities in materials) is far different than modelling an item and creating a 3 dimensional picture of that object, or creating a flashy new quake 3 skin .
Kudos to these guys for using (and creating) some really complex algorithms. Being in the field of 3D visualizations , I can appreciate the amount of time, energy and brainpower which go into a project such as this.
*penguin_nipple stands and applaudes*
To the article submitter who referred to "Those boys at Stanford", have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, some of those Stanford researchers might not be boys?
Now the project link appears to be slashdotted, so I can't actually confirm that the project doesn't feature all "boys", but I suspect that this is not the case. And even if it is, I think it would be better not to emphasize this in light of some of the recent Slashdot articles about gender issues.
Maybe I'm overreacting, but I'd like to see the day when more than 5% of my Computer Science class is female, and I don't think girls hearing about "Those boys at Stanford" will help that.
I've worked with just such machines, only on a smaller scale, and I have one fundamental complaint, the resulting object becomes imported as a mesh.
:)
/nutt
Oh, fine you say, thats the same as 3D studio uses, thats swell, right? wrong.
During the past year I have painstakingly reverse-engineering the childrens toy the bumble ball. This was done all in Mechanical Desktop 4 and Inventor 2.
Because of the details involved with the interior mechanics, I, along with my partner, when we turned to 3d studio to produce an animation, we found that mesh is nooo substitute for extrutions and constraints. Since the entire bumble ball is round, and all its features as well, the triangle constructions were autrotious. When we made a 3d model out of it using Stereo Lithography (SLA) it wasn't at all as nice as we had expected.
And then I looked over to all the other groups who were also reverse engineering things, and saw they're troubled 3d studio projects, and i simply refused to use it. I was happily rewarded when I was given the oportunity to use inventor 2, which, in accordance with autodesks file formats, is built on extrutions and constraints. Mmmmm...
Later into the year, when we were nearing completion, i saw what some students had '3d scanned', and it was a mess. What happens is that the scanner doesnt pick up a chamfer or a c' sink hole or an array, the object imports as a mesh. Mesh's might be swell to look at, but they're worthless to work with.
Ok, i'm done ranting. Oh, and by the way, I'm a sophmore in high school.
---
And please dont comment on my spelling..
Take the USA for example. The Constitution says that authors' exclusive rights must be "for limited times"; it doesn't say how limited. Limited to 999,999 years? Still limited.
The Walt Disney Company has been taking advantage of this loophole for years. Every time the copyright on early Mickey Mouse cartoons gets close to expiring, Disney just buys a 20-year retroactive extension.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There are two basic approaches to what I call "3-D immersive imagery": photographic (with zooms as jump-cuts or with scanning/panning), and virtual reality. As everyone who's ever worked with it knows, the problem with VR is building the model -- in order to move around, for example, Philadelphia, some poor sap has to run around modeling the whole thing. Projections can't be screened until a huge database exists. This technique sounds as if it can help build (automatically) these databases. (Remember when the protagonist in Cryptonomicron ran around making measurements of... was it Manilla?)
I just want to say that GL Tron is really cool. The lightcycles in it are better than the original movies!
-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
If something is in the public domain, derivative works are equally public.
That's what public domain means.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
This is Marc LeVoy's thing. He came to Stanford with a background in reducing data from medical volumetric scanners, either X-ray (CT scanners) or nuclear magnetic resonance (MRI scanners). He's big on the problem of reducing vast amounts of scanner data into some useful form.
That movie was sooo cool. I need to buy it on a high resolution video disk, maybe even a DVD if I have to.
They make solid-object printers... they have a couple of competitors, but I can't remember their names off-hand.
11*43+456^2