A New (school) Year

Over the summer we had several opportunities to keep testing PARSEC and work out more of the kinks.

• We did a scanning session with high school students participating in the UW Stout STEAM experience.
• We brought our school mascot Blaze into the lab and scanned both the full outfit and the incredibly detailed head.

Both of these opportunities taught us some lessons about how the software is still not always saving files to the right location. It also taught us the importance of lighting our subjects more intensely especially so we can stop down the aperture and get a really deep depth-of-field. But we worked around these issues and got some very pleasing results that we will share soon.

With Blaze, we also captured images using the on-camera flash modules. These images help to support research into fitting material properties to the surface of the scanned models instead of just sticking to the default albedo texture we get from off-the-shelf photogrammetry software. This is ongoing work being conducted by Michael Tetzlaff, another CS faculty member at Stout. That work is supported by a generous grant from the NEH and has engaged several undergraduate students giving them valuable research experience and the potential for publications! We are excited to be supporting this work.

There is still much to be done with PARSEC and I will continue to push forward this school year to expand documentation, fix bugs, and look for opportunities to scan data and enrich the student experience here at Stout. If you are interested in being a part of that please contact Seth Berrier.