Computer Program Transforms Anyone into a Master Sculptor
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It's like putting together Ikea furniture, but a bit more impressive. A new computer program beams easy-to-follow directions onto a piece of clay, allowing novices to sculpt anything they like. The New Scientist has a video of amateurs reproducing a realistic 3D rabbit, as well as the head of Michaelangelo's David.
The program could help make more realistic Claymation movies, as it is able to tape a person's movements, then guide animators to reproduce those movements in a clay figurine. It's not clear what other practical applications the program would have, but it's a feat for computer vision, the field of computer science that deals with getting machines to understand what they see.
To use the program, would-be sculptors scan the 3D object they want to reproduce. They then scan the lump of clay they want to sculpt. The machine intelligence compares the object with the lump of clay and uses a projector to shine patches of colored light onto the clay, indicating whether to take out some material here or add some material there, the New Scientist reported.
Computer scientists at MIT wrote the program, which they will present in November at SIGGRAPH Asia, a computer graphics conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Source: New Scientist
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