3d

At 2pm today I went down to the fishbowl with some of the other interns. There we got to talk to a graduate student named David Nilosek and he showed us some of the work he has done regarding 3d imaging. Mr. Nilosek had made a program that uses a camera and a projector to measure the spacing of lines projected onto a surface, in order to see how far away a pixel is from the camera. The product of this is a 3d image usable in programs like Blender. Some of the other interns got to use the device to scan their faces into the computer. It was a very interesting half hour.

Blender

Today was a day of experiments in Blender. Rolo brought me down a book on "The Essential Blender" and it looks pretty helpful so far. Hopefully I can get some instructions on making a curved surface. What was learned today? 3D CURVES ARE MORE DIFFICULT THEN THEY LOOK!

Oops!

I forgot to blog yesterday, oh the horror! On a less dramatic note yesterday was reasonably uneventful. I finally got the envi to blender file conversion thing working with help from Nina, Rolo, and the IT people who solved my permissions errors, and I am still progressing with my 3d bridge. Final presentations are just around the corner; I cant believe how fast the summer is going!

More palimpsest

Today I met with Dr. Easton and he gave me an overview of his adventures as a document restorer as well as some of the process they use to read overwritten texts. While he had mentioned so during his talk to everyone in the fish bowl, I never imagined that each individual pixel of an image had to be categorized the way he pointed out today. Most simply put, he has to tell the computer what to do so it can go in and highlight the right pixels, in order to display the under-text. Dr. Easton was not only nice enough to give me a book on the Archimedes palimpsest but he even showed me some of Beethoven's original work! He has so much data; I counted three different 750 gig external drives... I am still extremely interested in this field, its amazing to me that Dr. Easton and his coworkers have been able to see so many important documents. A few hours after that meeting I went with the rest of the RS interns to a debriefing for our data collect from last week, and that ended another day here at RIT.

UNIX

Rolo came down to check on us today and I showed him the permission errors I have been getting in my UNIX codes. Until they are fixed I wont be able to continue with my work for Dr. Gartley. But this is only one project that is going on, the bridge I am building in Blender is coming along nicely. Onto texturing!

In the fish bowl

The most interesting thing that happened today was actually what we did during lunch. Bob brought all of the interns down to the fishbowl (a semi circular room with a huge projector screen or presentations) and we listened to Dr. Easton describe his work in document restoration. He has been to places all over the world and uses different spectrums of light to draw out the faded text in important historical documents. One that he has been working on for ten + years is the Archimedes Palimpsest; a book written by Archimedes about his theories which was written over again to become a Christian prayerbook. I was shocked anyone would destroy something so important. It was extremely interesting to me, I already love ancient history and if I did not want to be a software engineer I think I would enjoy the field of document restoration.

Wait for iiiiit...

THE COLLECT IS FINALLY DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Nothing more need be said.