Eastman

This afternoon we went to the George Eastman House to see some of the work they are doing on restoring some of the first photographs ever taken. These images call Daguerreotypes are basically images printed on a flat silver surface using mercury, and look alot like mirrorstill viewed from the right angle. I enjoyed seeing them and it was definintly worth it to be able to get a glimpse of photographic history.

Waaah!

Yesterday's blog slipped my mind again, I was just so busy I forgot to post. Everything has been working up to our final presentations and getting the powerpoint ready has been the main thing on my mind. Nina and Rolo both came down to the lab yesterday and helped Sean and I get some more info for our power points, but I don't know how I am going to fit in everything I need to say in 10 minutes. The 20th marks our last day as interns here at RIT.

Bridge

Today I worked on making my bridge more realistic looking. Watched some Blender tutorials on user interface and hot-keys helped, as I wont have to go button hunting as much anymore. After lunch I got to play some Modern Warfare 2 as part of an experiment for the visual perception interns and I have top say I pretty terrible at it, but I still had tons of fun. Hopefully I will be able to find something on making a curved surface before our presentations next week.

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.