3D Photography

Interacting with rare works of art and cultural objects has historically been left to the professionals -- a limited number of highly trained curators, anthropologists, and historians. For the rest of us, the objects are behind glass and out of reach.

With Geomagic software, one-of-a-kind, museum-quality objects can be examined with no risk to the objects themselves. Researchers or project team members collaborating from multiple locations can manipulate high-resolution 3D photographs in real time -- zoom in, rotate, add light, zoom out -- all without handling the original object. The educational, archival, reproduction, and research applications are astounding.

Here's how it's possible.

Amazing levels of detail and accuracy are first captured using Geomagic Studio and the Arius3D Laser Camera. Once scanned, Geomagic Studio preserves an object's 3D geometry (xyz data) along with the color (RGB data). Studio even captures microscopic surface geometries (or bump maps). This surface detail gives every Geomagic 3D photograph an unparalleled level of depth and richness.

The resulting digital duplicate -- in this case a handcrafted bust of Nefertiti, a German coin from 1768 and an oil painting -- can be viewed on screen, shared over a network, or copied with no degradation in quality.

Less equipment, less training, more options.

Two years ago, you would have needed an expensive 3D workstation, complex 3D software, and a whole lot of training to view and work with similar 3D models that had been painstakingly recreated manually by an expert in 3D modeling. With Geomagic Studio and a 3D scanner, objects are photographed in 3D -- automatically. All you need in order to view them is a desktop PC, a consumer-grade NVIDIA 3D graphics card, and an easily installed 3D viewer. The Nefertiti animation above and the detailed stills at the right were all created from a single, high-resolution Geomagic 3D photograph viewed on a basic Pentium II 266 with an old 16 MB NVIDIA TNT card and 196 MB of RAM.

Of course, capturing the tremendous detail you see makes for very large image files. But when highly accurate detail -- not small file size -- is crucial, Studio delivers exactly what you need. For files intended for the Web, Studio can create Viewpoint (formerly Metastream) interactive 3D. The Viewpoint file format preserves the macro geometry and color of an object, but discards the micro geometry (the bump map) of the surface detail, and heavily compresses the data to keep file sizes small enough to stream easily over the Web. View our gallery of Geomagic 3D photography streamed in the Viewpoint file format and see for yourself.