Of photogrammetry, geeks and culture

Last month saw the first meeting of a Brighton-based group called Culture Geeks. The idea is to link up people from technical fields (geeks) with people from the world of museums, heritage, etc. (culture).

The event started with a great presentation by Karina Rodriguez Echavarria, a researcher at the University of Brighton. Her talk focussed on the use of 3D by cultural institutions, and specifically the various techniques to capture, process and display it. Her talk can be downloaded here (PDF, 1.1Mb).

The things that piqued my interest the most were low-cost ways to capture 3D information. One of these is photogrammetry, where multiple 2D photos are analysed to build up a picture of what the object looks like in three dimensions. Microsoft’s PhotoSynth does this, as does the ARC3D Web Service from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

To try this out, I went to the churchyard opposite our office and took a dozen photos of a treestump from different angles. I then uploaded these using the (Windows-only) ARC3D software, and in a few minutes received a link to download the data after it had been crunched by the ARC3D computing grid.

This data is then rendered using the visualisation software which you can see in the screen capture below:

In it, you can see a source photo, and how that transforms to a particular view of the treestump. Then, you can switch off the photographic texture to leave a raw set of points. Another interesting technique mentioned by Karina was a low-cost laser-scanning system called DAVID, which only requires a normal webcam and a laser pointer to work.

The talk led on to an interesting discussion. A Linden Labs employee talked about museums in Second Life, as well as an experiment in recreating Van Gogh’s Starry Night (I couldn’t help place-dropping by pointing out that I had seen the original the week before at the opening of MoMA’s latest Van Gogh exhibition).

It wasn’t all geeks doing the talking, however. Ruth Harper from Culture24 mentioned that Seb Chan from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum has some interesting ideas to overcome the long-standing friction between curatorial voice and user-generated content. Powerhouse apparently put huge numbers of their works on Flickr, and then have a ’semi-permeable membrane’ whereby they selectively re-import user-contributed tags and metadata back into their main online collection pages.

All in all, it was a very interesting evening, and I look forward to attending more of these in the future. If you want to get involved too, head over to the Culture Geeks website to find out more.