9 ms·
Artists Covertly Scan Bust of Nefertiti and Release the Data for Free Online
- iNerdier 11y agoThis is one of the more interesting things to come out of the overlap of technology and artworks to my mind. If we continue to have arrangements like that of the Elgin Marbles in London some kind of compromise where a good quality facsimile like this can be created for relatively cheap and displayed to the public then at least we get to have a freer access to our shared heritage. It's a crying shame they had to resort to doing it undercover though. What exactly has the museum really got to lose?
- roywiggins 11y agoProbably portable 3D scanners makes it easier, but facsimile art isn't new at all. The V&A museum in London has a huge set of Victorian-era plaster casts of EVERYTHING: http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/c/cast-courts/ http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/c/cast-courts/ There's a whole industry of manuscript fascimiles: http://www.facsimilefinder.com/ http://www.facsimilefinder.com/
- Turing_Machine 11y agoYes, people have been making facsimiles for a long time. The Spurlock Museum in Urbana, IL has a set of copies of the Elgin Marbles, for instance.
- justincormack 11y agoYes, was about to say the same, the Convention for Promoting Universal Reproductions of Works of Art was in 1867. 3D printing of sculptures is hardly new...
- ry_ry 11y agoIf i had to hazard a guess? Some slightly muddled thinking, mired in the ill-considered application existing digital copyright law concepts.
- acomjean 11y agoHarvard reopened its art museum last year. Its not creative commons, but pretty much everything is now online and searchable. While not everthing is high-res (picasso cough..) and the interface is meh (you have to zoom too much, its really a good start. I think they allow visitors to take pictures too. I think you can't stop it cell phones being cameras now. http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/291708?position=3 http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/291708?p... http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections
- tiglionabbit 11y agoThey snuck in kinects under their ties. That's great.
- unchocked 11y agoWas wondering how they did it, clearly a better resolution than photogrammetry. Source?
- evereadicus 11y agoThe institutional form of "Journalism" never informs the reader of the means to commit an action, especially when that action can be trivially replicated by a lone individual, for fear of copy cat "crimes" becoming a rampant problem. Except, of course, when it's school shootings and such. Then you learn exactly how it goes down, in every gory detail, repeated 24 hours a day in the cable news echo chamber. This way, there will always be copy cats for that sort of thing. And the ad revenue on those stories is just out of this world.
- vitd 11y agoThe video in the article shows them doing it: https://vimeo.com/148156899 https://vimeo.com/148156899
- StringyBob 11y agoI'd almost forgotten about the Kinect. After a lot of buzz about hacker applications of a Kinect at first release things seem to have gone quiet over the last year. Kind of surprised not to see more oculus dk2 / Kinect v2 mashups - maybe they'll be a resurgence in interest when oculus gets a full release...
- garblegarble 11y agoThere's something really fishy about the quality of the model if the kinect was used to capture the data, it seems more likely that this is a cover-story for a leak of the museum's 3D laser scan data
- jlev 11y agoCosmo Wenman also does this for museums, with their permission, and releases the data under open licenses https://cosmowenman.wordpress.com/category/3d-scanning/ https://cosmowenman.wordpress.com/category/3d-scanning/ http://www.thingiverse.com/CosmoWenman/designs/ http://www.thingiverse.com/CosmoWenman/designs/
- aresant 11y agoI anticipate all sorts of crazy digital-rights management battles ahead for 3D objects like this - including art - but even more on likenesses / people / etc. Roughly a year ago I bought a structure scanner (1) for my iPad, scanned in friends, imported to unity and let them walk around themselves in the Oculus DK2. That was a very cool experience but an unexpected result was how many people asked me to delete the scan afterwords. The comment was it was too creepy to have your 3d likeness floating around out there, these comments from friends that spend their days posting 2d to FB / instagram. A bust is about the ideal thing to scan with current consumer tech, since it's completely static, but add in algorithmic stabilization / stitching and 3d scanning a human (or recreating from photographs) with or without their permission is right around the corner. (1) http://structure.io/ http://structure.io/
- hayksaakian 11y agoi think it's a generational thing. if you asked people 10 years before facebook to post pictures of themselves voluntarily all over the web, they would have the same response. the same will happen for 3d likenesses once it's trivial to post '3d selfies' on '3d instagram'.
- SquidLord 11y ago3D selfies, you say? https://sketchfab.com/models?q=selfie&sort_by=-likeCount https://sketchfab.com/models?q=selfie&sort_by=-likeCount
- ascorbic 11y agoPeople have been posting selfies ever since digital cameras have been available. Before Facebook they were on Livejournal and MySpace, and before that Geocities. There were just fewer because phone cameras were really shitty ten years ago.
- Animats 11y ago"I anticipate all sorts of crazy digital-rights management battles ahead for 3D objects like this - including art." A 3D scan of an existing object does not create a new copyrighted work under US law. See Meshwerks vs. Toyota. This follows Bridgeman vs. Corel (2D photos don't create a new copyrighted work), which follows the famous Supreme Court decision Feist vs. Rural Telephone (which allowed loading phone directories into databases.).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Keyframe 11y agoI expected this to be a thing 15+ years ago, starting with this at Stanford: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/
- ginko 11y agoYou can't download their David dataset though. Which is a crying shame since artworks like this should belong to all mankind.
- msutherl 11y agoRelated, and perhaps a more poetic treatment of the issue: http://hyperallergic.com/106071/3d-print-your-own-museum/ http://hyperallergic.com/106071/3d-print-your-own-museum/ http://oliverlaric.com/ http://oliverlaric.com/ https://vimeo.com/51614085 https://vimeo.com/51614085
- zupreme 11y agoThis is the future. Copyrights and patents were really only effective when the means of production were out of the reach of the average person. 3D printing, digital audio, and other current technologies are almost certainly going to make copyrights only effective at stopping mass monetezation of copied content - not at stopping the copying and sharing of content for personal use. 3D printers in particular, I believe, will trigger the decimation of the scale model and toy markets as we know them. The only vestiges which are likely to survive will be those requiring a high number of moving parts, motorizations, and more.
- x5n1 11y agoDoes not make sense to say that most people will not have jobs and we will have minimum income, and then add that all the infinite goods will be limited in supply by law. The whole point is yes we have no more jobs, and all the infinite goods are free to whoever wants them. The producers of the infinite goods live off either other business models or on structured income, perhaps determined by how much of their infinite goods are consumed by the public.
- overgard 11y agoI doubt the last claim; even if the materials were cheap enough you're dealing with a lot of assembly. If capitalism has taught us anything it's that people will pay for convenience. Plus packaging and branding are huge in those markets. Shopping for and opening the toy is like half the excitement!
- zupreme 11y agoI agree. Toys which require a great deal of assembly effort will probably remain viable in the marketplace - for now. But now that the 3d-printing door has been opened I do think there are already lots of smart people working on companion technologies to bridge the articulation and assembly gaps.
- knughit 11y agoExcept for well branded characters, toys already sell basically at cost of materials, thanks to Chinese manufacturing
- toomuchtodo 11y agoExcitingly enough, UNESCO and IDA are helping fund cameras for 3D scanning of cultural heritage sites in Syria to preserve them in the event ISIS/ISIL destroys them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_cultural_heritage_by_ISIL#Response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_cultural_herita... "After the Palmyra temple's destruction in August 2015, the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) announced plans to establish a digital record of historical sites and artifacts threatened by ISIL advance.[56][57][58][59] To accomplish this goal, the IDA, in collaboration with UNESCO, will deploy 5,000 3D cameras to partners in the Middle East.[60] The cameras will be used to capture 3D scans of local ruins and relics.[61][62][63]" Million Image Database: http://digitalarchaeology.org.uk/projects/ http://digitalarchaeology.org.uk/projects/ Mapillary is also performing photogrammetry on a massive scale with crowdsourced photos (Mapillary allows for the use of their photo database for contribution to OSM as well: https://www.mapillary.com/osm.html https://www.mapillary.com/osm.html). http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html The future is very bright for recreating 3D objects as well as map data programatically. EDIT: Apologies this comment isn't formatted better, was super excited to get all of this information into a comment quickly. It intersects right between my archival and photogrammetry interests.
- themartorana 11y agoThank goodness for this. The destruction of culturally significant artifacts of such age and importance is incredibly sad to me. At least photography existed before ISIS got here. 3D models are even better. Makes you wonder what else has been destroyed throughout history. Crazy, sad stuff.
- cmrx64 11y agoIn the Star Control II lore, the Ur-Quan (evil invading alien race) have as a condition of surrender the destruction of all structures older than 500 years, to destroy any history of not being subjugated by the Ur-Quan. It's a really interesting and sad thing.
- 11y ago
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoHuh, OS X's Preview.app can load .stl files. I was able to torrent the bust, double-click it, and view it straight away. That was a surprise.
- 4ad 11y agoNice! Now when will I be able to do the same with .mkv files?!?
- jacquesm 11y agoRedundancy is a good thing.
- mitchtbaum 11y agoWoah... Yeah, artifacts like these are critically vulnerable.. Please keep this up.
- marcosscriven 11y agoIt does seem a shame to me that such things are often prohibited from being photographed, at least without a flash. I do recall a few years ago the British Museum in London hosted a few dozen Terracotta Warriors. I snapped a photo only to be told not to. When I asked why, they said it was copyrighted!
- bd 11y agoHere is quick and dirty WebGL view of that Nefertiti model: http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/nefertiti.html http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/nefertiti.html
- ekianjo 11y agoIsnt art from antiquity devoid of all copyright anyway? Why arent such scans completely lawful in the first place especially when they belong to the public?
- sp332 11y agoCopyright, yes. But the museum is allowed to hide the object and their scans if they want to. If there is legal action against the scholars, it would be for damages (probably lost revenue) and not for copyright infringement.
- ekianjo 11y agoDoes the Museum actually own the work of art? I think they probably own the physical object but isnt its artistic expression considered as intellectual property and therefore wouldnt it fall in the public domain? As for the lost revenue claim, then what about the pictures of paintings you find everywhere? Wouldnt they cause lost revenue as well if we follow that logic?
- sp332 11y agoIt's not copyrighted, so the intellectual property is in the public domain. But this doesn't mean they are prohibited from hiding the object, or making people contractually agree not to take photos. In the USA, there are certain fair use rights that let you copy a work without a license. It's a big gray area, usually it's OK if it's for purposes of commentary or education, and not for commercial use. Other jurisdictions are probably more strict.
- ianamartin 11y agoThis pleases me to no end. Sort of reminds me that an imperfect representation of Bach's Brandenbourg II is floating around on Voyager, encoded on a golden disc. As a professional violinist for almost 30 years, and an expert in early music, it makes me a little sad that it's that recording that got sent out. On the other hand, it thrills me that 4.5 or so billions of years from now, long after we are extinct, and when the sun goes dark, Bach will still be out there in the cosmos. Not a perfect Bach. Not the best representation. Not at all what he would have imagined. But a representation. Completely off-topic and re: Fermi's paradox. I think that the voyager mission was a unique thing. It was only possible for a brief window of time in which we had the technology to do it, and the social willingness to do it. It was a short period of time. Think about the social and political implications a mission like Voyager would have today. If you tried to do that today, people and countries and orgs from all over the world would argue for inclusion. I think there's a Simpsons episode about this. My point about Fermi is that I'm suggesting that there was only about a 10 year window in which Voyager was both technically possible and socially acceptable. In the time scale of intelligent life, that's a very narrow window. I sometimes wonder if there isn't a lot of intelligent life out there whose civilizations simply missed that window. In other words, a lot of life that would very much like to say hello, but can't agree on how to do it. Sorry for the tangent.
- jakobegger 11y agoThis is awesome. I'm affiliated with a project that documents stone monuments [1](photos only)... Any suggestions for a cheap, portable 3D scanner? I saw the structure.io scanner mentioned here, anybody have any other suggestions? [1] ubi-erat-lupa.org
- Ono-Sendai 11y agoPretty impressive quality of model considering the means of acquisition. here's a render I made of it: http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/download/file.php?id=20559&mode=view http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/download/file.php?id=205... Edit: profile render: http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/download/file.php?id=20560&mode=view http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/download/file.php?id=205...
- hendekagon 11y agoAFAIA such scanners can only capture the surface of a thing, and cannot gain information about overhangs and occluded surfaces. For some purposes one needs volume information What options are there for consumer-level volume scanning using ultrasound ?
- probably_wrong 11y ago> Al-Badri and Nelles take issue, for instance, with the Neues Museum’s method of displaying the bust, which apparently does not provide viewers with any context of how it arrived at the museum This saddens me, as the Neues Museum has seen the other side of this coin: After the war, lots of items were looted by the Russians, most notably jewelry from Troy. But I guess this must be common practice for several museums. Random fact: While the museum doesn't allow you to take pictures (not even from another room), they do have a 3d reconstruction you can touch, destined to blind visitors.
- Camillo 11y ago> “The head of Nefertiti represents all the other millions of stolen and looted artifacts all over the world currently happening, for example, in Syria, Iraq, and in Egypt,” Al-Badri said. “Archaeological artifacts as a cultural memory originate for the most part from the Global South; however, a vast number of important objects can be found in Western museums and private collections. We should face the fact that the colonial structures continue to exist today and still produce their inherent symbolic struggles.” I am always amazed by people's ability to choose the worst possible examples or context for whatever point they're trying to make. Syria and Iraq are currently undergoing unprecedented destruction of archeological heritage, perpetrated entirely by people from the "Global South", fighting for (their part of) the "Global South"'s resurgence against the evil West. I always wanted to visit Syria; now I can only wish that more of its monuments and artifacts had been taken abroad, so that they could be saved.