3D Lab – Alexandre Tokovinine

VISUAL DOCUMENTATION LAB

The Visual Documentation Lab is a research and teaching space dedicated to digital photography, drawing, photogrammetry, and 3D scanning. The primary application is Archaeology and Cultural Heritage: field records, documentation of museum collections, and illustrations for publications. Students and faculty members from other disciplines are also welcome to use the lab’s resources. Key lab resources were made available through the collaboration with and generosity of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (CMHI), Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, that donated digital drawing tablets. The 3D scanner, plus the associated hardware and software, are on loan from the Peabody Museum. The rest of the equipment was funded through the startup fund.

RESOURCES: HARDWARE

3D SCANNER

SmartSCAN Duo is a structured-light 3D scanner. It consists of a projector and two cameras mounted on a carbon fiber rod. The operating distance from the scanned surface is fixed at 70cm. The size of the scanned area or field of view (FOV) and the X.Y resolution (the smallest distance between any two points in a single scan) could be altered by using different lens kits. Three sets of lenses are available at the lab: 600 mm FOV, X.Y resolution of 0.36 mm; 300 mm FOV, X.Y resolution of 0.18 mm; 90 mm FOV, X.Y resolution of 0.06 mm

INTERACTIVE PEN DISPLAYS

The lab has three Wacom Interactive Pen displays. A larger 21-inch monitor is connected to a desktop with Adobe Creative Cloud including Photoshop and Illustrator. It comes with two digitizing pens and a variety of pen nibs for technical and artistic drawings. There are also two smaller 11-inch interactive drawing screens, which are portable and may be connected to laptops. Each screen comes with its own digitizing pen and pen nibs. Users will need to install Wacom drivers (available online).

WORKSTATION

A customized Dell Precision workstation will handle even the most demanding processing tasks. For example, it can generate meshes from up to 300,000,000 points in Agisoft Photoscan/Metashape. The workstation comes with several essential software packages (see below).