Visitors
to the New Orleans Museum of Art now can peer through the windows of a reproduction
of Monticello's west façade - the side shown on the nickel - and see a
3-D image of Thomas Jefferson's library, thanks to the efforts of a team of computer
scientists in Virginia and North Carolina. This won't be the first time that museums
have used virtual reality techniques to transport their visitors into different
times and places, said David Luebke, assistant professor of computer science at
the University of Virginia. But it is the first time the technique has been combined
with laser-scanning technology to show what an actual room looks like, rather
than to display a computer-generated drawing, he said. "Visitors to the New
Orleans exhibition [can] see an authentic, three-dimensional image of Jefferson's
library that is accurate down to the square centimeter," Luebke said.
The
Monticello exhibit is part of the museum's five-month exhibition of "Jefferson's
America & Napoleon's France," which commemorates the bicentennial of
the Louisiana Purchase, and opened to the public on April 12. Luebke began the
project after learning about a prototype laser scanner built by Lars Nyland at
the University of North Carolina. Together, Luebke and Nyland sought a site of
public and historic interest for a detailed scan. They conducted a pilot scan
of Monticello in the summer of 2000, and the New Orleans museum contacted Luebke
shortly thereafter regarding plans for using the scanned image in this year's
exhibition.
Nyland's start-up company is refining the scanner - a sort
of giant, digital camera that records a scene in minute detail by scanning every
inch of a room with a laser - and reducing their television-sized prototype to
a smaller, more lightweight, portable scanner. The current model - the DeltaSphere
3000 - is a 12-inch-by-12-inch-by-4-inch box weighing about 30 pounds. For their
part, Luebke and his students have focused on improving the speed and quality
of the visual display of the scanner.
Over several months, Luebke, his
students and his U.N.C. colleagues trucked the equipment up the mountain to scan
Jefferson's library. The room needed to be free of visitors, so Luebke and his
team worked around visiting hours, using the scanner at night and early in the
morning. Luebke plans to provide Monticello with the virtual images for its Web
site. He also hopes to collaborate with Monticello to scan other rooms and other
buildings on the historic site for use in research, education or publication on
the Web.
The project fits in with Luebke's research interest in creating
rapid, understandable visual displays of huge data sets. With each scan of Monticello
made up of 10 million data points, the challenge is to create software that can
organize and display the information fast enough to create a meaningful picture
for an interactive display. The solution involves inventing techniques to enable
the computer to identify the most important 10th of the information and ignore
the rest.
The technology's applications in the fields of architecture and
archaeology particularly interest Luebke. He also sees potential applications
in medicine and emergency rescue work, among other fields. "Whenever you
develop a new technology like this, some applications are clear from the outset
and others develop over time," Luebke said. "As the use of visual displays
of information expands, I won't know how exactly my research will be useful. I
just know that it will be."
For a glimpse of this project, visit the Scanning
Monticello Web site.
