The Luddy School and its Virtual World Heritage Laboratory are part of a four-partner consortium to digitize selected Revolutionary War artifacts in 3-D.
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a three-year grant for the project, A New Online Archive for the Study of the American Revolution, which ties into the country’s 250th anniversary. Total funding for the project is $749,000. Luddy’s share is $200,000. The project will start in about a month.
The World Heritage Laboratory, along with Flyover Zone, a Bloomington ed-tech company, will be 3-D digitizing about 150 artifacts and 2-D digitizing about 100 more located at the Frazier History Museum and Sons of the American Revolution Museum. Artifacts include military weapons and equipment; documents, currency and the written word; and everyday life and household artifacts such as tools, cookware, furniture and children’s toys.
Military weapons include the Turtle, the world’s first submarine used in combat during the Revolutionary War. Documents will include newspapers, Continental Currency, correspondence, and legal instruments.
Heritage Laboratory Director Gabriele Guidi said this project will allow scholars to study everyday objects that have never been examined before without needing to travel to the objects.
“Understanding more about what happened during that period, especially not the war event that has been very well documented, but thanks to the everyday object, understand what was going on among the normal people, the everyday people, how they behaved, what they thought, what was the atmosphere during that transformative period of American history,” Guidi said.
The 3-D digitization will take pictures all around the object and process them, using a photogrammetric procedure which identifies common features in the different images. The process orients the images in space and then performs what’s called the calibration of the camera, Guidi said. Once these steps are completed, image matching will automatically generate a dense cloud of 3-D points. This leads to generating the mesh, which is the model, the shape of the object, and its texture, he said.
“You have to take several photographs around the object, and then you merge them and you process them in such a way…(that) gives you a digital twin of the physical object,” he said. “A digital twin means that also the size is totally the same, so it can be measured and analyzed, and this is very useful if you want to study something.”
Possible challenges will be digitizing shiny or transparent objects because they are not compatible with the optical process used to generate the model. Guidi said they have dealt with this issue before in past projects and should be able to solve it this time.
A web-based 3D viewer will support metrical measurement directly on the models; enriched, object-level metadata; two significantly expanded public databases owned by consortium members; and a portal hosted by the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory.
“So, the purpose of the portal will be to protect this data and to allow the visualization not only of the standard model but also other types,” Guidi said.