we here in the library of the Royal
Society the UK Academy of Sciences in
London and we're going to apply a really
modern piece of technology to something
that's really quite out here we've got
some experts from the Microsoft research
labs in Cambridge who brought along a 3d
scanner and we're going to try and scan
something really very special so this is
a Kinect camera and some of you might
recognize this if you play a lot of
computer games it's actually a
peripheral for the Xbox gaming platform
the basic idea is that you stick this
above your TV let's say and it's able to
capture your body and track your human
skeleton in real time then allow you to
use that skeleton as an input device so
you can almost throw away the gaming
controller and actually interact
directly with the game using your whole
body so what we've done is instead of
actually keeping the the Xbox Kinect
camera stationary why don't we actually
grab hold event and move it around in 3d
space and use the data that it captures
to create a 3d scanner a very cheap
commodity 3d scanner that anyone can
pick up and use so we're actually
researchers at Microsoft Research in
Cambridge and this is a collaboration
with Imperial College London and this is
a research project basically so that's
part of our remit as researchers we
build crazy wacky new algorithms and
systems and this is one of the systems
that we happen to have developed so
we're gonna take this Kinect camera and
we're gonna scan in the camera man and
Martin in real time so the basic idea
here is to take the noisy data that
we're seeing up here from the Kinect
camera which is from a single viewpoint
it's got lots of holes in it and the the
depth estimations are very noisy they
fluctuate and what we want to do is take
that data and stitch or fuse that data
together to create a single 3d model
that you could use in a CAD application
or in a computer game so we've come here
to scan Sir Isaac Newton's deaf mask
which is very exciting
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it looks amazing yes so what we're doing
now is actually trying to move the
camera such that we can capture a 3d
view of the the death-mask
I think it's all gone to plan we've got
a 3d scan of size at Newton's death mask
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so now what we've really come here for
is to actually grab a scan of Martin's
head we are there's Martin forever
virtualized
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