The Rotisserie Scanner

Wired online recently had a nice article on the effects work behind the upcoming Matrix sequel. There was an amazing amount of data collected in a variety of ways to capture the actor's digital performances*.

This was the spark for this little foray into home-brew imaging technology.

At some point I'd like to build a 3D Scanner, but I figured I'd start more modestly and try to build a workable home solution for getting a usable unwrapped image of a person's head.

There have been some interesting deviations from that initial goal, but the road has been fun to travel.

First Try in Two Parts

I have a bunch of imaging devices lying about, but for this experiment I focused on two. Contestant number one is an old flatbed scanner that has been gather dust due to it's slow scan speed and marginal image quality. Contestant number two hails from Kodak, a sassy little 2 megapixel EasyShare camera that we bought for my wife's trip to New Zealand.

The image above [Link] is the initial scanner test. The scanner is unaltered, and I am manually turning a standard Halloween styrofoam skull, trying to track with the moving scan head. Not bad.

The image below [Link] surprised me. It's the same skull, sitting on a little Lego turntable. I took several images, and stitched them together by hand. It worked out quite well. I'll talk more about how it was created a little later.

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