WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A MIT research group were able to successfully capture a high-resolution 3D scan of a T Rex skull using Mircosoft Kinect and some free software.
Last year, a team of forensic dentists got authorization to perform a 3-D scan of the prized Tyrannosaurus rex skull at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, in an effort to try to explain some strange holes in the jawbone.
However, the high-resolution dental scanners were not able to scan a jaw as big as a tyrannosaur's. The group then contacted the Camera Culture group at MIT's Media Lab, which had recently made headlines with a prototype system for producing high-resolution 3-D scans.
The prototype wasn't ready for a job that big, however, so Camera Culture researchers used $150 in hardware and some free software to rig up a system that has since produced a 3-D scan of the entire five-foot-long T. rex skull.
'A lot of people will be able to start using this,' says Anshuman Das, a research scientist at the Camera Culture group and first author on the paper. 'That's the message I want to send out to people who would generally be cut off from using technology - for example, paleontologists or museums that are on a very tight budget. There are so many other fields that could benefit from this.'
The system uses a Microsoft Kinect, a depth-sensing camera designed for video gaming. The Kinect's built-in software produces a 'point cloud,' a 3-D map of points in a visual scene from which short bursts of infrared light have been reflected back to a sensor. Free software called MeshLab analyzes the point cloud and infers the shape of the surfaces that produced it.
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