The Project

"What is the blue sheet for?" she asked curiously. It was hanging from the end wall and didn't really fit with the rest of the décor. "Oh, that's my blue screen," he explained. "I use it as a background when I take pictures so it's easier to isolate the object I want to model. Look, I'll show you."

There was a small table in front of the wall, also covered in bright blue cloth. He took a small wooden bowl down the shelf and placed it on the table. Then he got a digital camera and took pictures of the bowl from several different angles.

"Now I'll use my software to create a three-dimensional model out of these images." He turned on the computer. "Um, would you like the chair?" he offered courteously.

Julia declined since he would need to sit down to use the computer. She was happy to stand and watch. He plugged in the camera and downloaded the images. The he opened the program he had developed. "My object-recognition algorithms detect the shape of the object from each image," he explained. "I just need to tell it which angle I took each picture from so it can put them together to create the model."

He preceded to do as he described. Julia noticed the interface for the software was pretty rough and the process seemed to involve a lot of tweaking of the source code. Now she understood why it needed more work to make it ready for commercial use.

Steven clicked a button and an hourglass appeared. "I'm creating the model now. It doesn't usually get it quite right the first time but I have a few tricks to improve it."

An image finally appeared on the screen. Julia leaned over his shoulder to get a better look. "What the hell is that?" she asked. The object looked vaguely wooden in texture but it had odd spikes and angles and looked nothing like the original bowl.

"Um. Yes." Steven looked embarrassed. "This is the albedo problem I mentioned earlier. Reflections confuse the software. But I can fix it by constraining it to a basic mesh shaped like the object."

He selected something which looked like the wire outline of a bowl and processed the image again. This time, the resulting image looked almost exactly like the original bowl.

"Hey, that's pretty cool," Julia said. "But what is the advantage of that image over the original photos you took?"