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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Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Scientist

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, " Song of Myself "

You see, I have projects. They come upon me unbidden, as my sweet wife knows too well. And then come the drills, duct tape, Lego, sculpey, magnets and dare I say it, lasers…the list is delimited only by the bounds of necessity.

These projects span the gamut from mechanical engineering to molecular biology, imaging technology to home decorating. Like I said, unbidden. So faced with a genetic predisposition to mad scientism, I decided it was either share the fruits of my tinkering on the web site, or build a secret base inside a volcano and work on world domination. As the current housing bubble* has made secret island bases prohibitively expensive**, I’ve chosen the former.

So let’s stroll by Chrome Cow Labs and see what’s cooking.

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	A Macro Lighting Rig The built-in flash on my camera doesn’t really work well for macro photography. Take a high-output halogen flashlight, add a few bucks worth of supplies, and you get a lightweight rig for lighting macro photos [ Link ]
	The Rotisserie Scanner What do you get when you cross a scanner with some serious Lego construction? A curiously eccentric cylindrical scanner. What happens when the scanner ends up on the front page of Slashdot? 33 gigs of transfer, 1.2 million hits and all sorts of fun. [Link]
	Desktop 3D Scanner from Common (Geek) Household Supplies The next step in rotisserie scanning: Actual 3D scanning. Using cheap re-purposed tech, I hope to build functional 3D scanner capable of digitizing objects several inches in height. [Link]

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* I wrote this 3 years ago. Pop already!
** It’s actually not true. You can get some "fixer-upper" islands for less than a house in Boston. Volcano not included.

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