Today's much-hyped virtual reality, a technology that allows goggled users to, say, take a flight over a mountainous landscape, often involves little more than crude, computer-generated geometric shapes. But now a group of Ottawa scientists has learned how to put highly textured, realistic objects into the virtual universe.
The innovative technology will allow everyone from paleontologists to astronauts to study three-dimensional pieces of the real world -- a rare dinosaur bone or the inside of the space shuttle -- without actually going anywhere near them, says Marc Rioux of the National Research Council (NRC) Institute for Information Technology.
The NRC team is "virtualizing reality" with a combination of laser-scanning technology and virtual-reality hardware. A small 3-D laser digitizer emits three beams -- read, green and blue -- as it scans an object. The reflected light is digitized and the data are stored in a computer. The software developed by the NRC enables users to view a 3-D image of the object on a video display or even produce a physical model of the original. To view it, users don stereo glasses linked to an infrared sensor; it tracks the user's head movements and directs the computer to move the image correspondingly to create an illusion of three dimensions.
The most innovative feature of the system, says Rioux, is that "it yields, at the same time, a large field of view and high resolution." The scanner captures details down to five microns in size (a micron is one-thousandth of a millimetre).
Among the first to take advantage of the new system were scientists at the Canadian Conservation Institute, who used it to examine an estate stamp on a painting purported to be the work of the artist Tom Thomson. Close examination of the 3-D imprint taken from the stamp, at the 25-micron level, helped experts confirm that the painting was genuine. Engineers at Spar Aerospace in Brampton, Ontario, are using the system to scan and then study possible nuclear waste-disposal sites.
Rioux and his team are now working on a scanner that will record not just an object's shape and color, but also its material composition. With such a device, says Rioux, "the computer could recognize that part of the object is metal or plastic by observing the effect of polarized light. It could even have a self-indexing system, where most of the information about an object would be recognized and recorded automatically. You can image how useful that would be."
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