Matterport at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis

November 10, 2019

I never got a chance to write about this at the time last year. But now that it is about to be completed, it seems like a good time to revisit it.

Last year, my colleague Albert William and I purchased a Matterport camera, and in September of 2018 we did a little project with the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. We scanned two exhibits in the museum: The Dinosphere with its archeology lab, and the Take Me There China Exhibit (which was being de-installed the following month after a multi-year run). We then photographed several objects from those exhibits in order to embed photogrammetry of them into our Matterport scans.

Here is the scan of the Dinosphere: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=6hL6Xnxz3Rt

And here is the scan of the Take Me There Exhibit: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=Xb6rRcRQ22L

Be sure to click the pins and see some of the photogrammetry full screen. Each objects is photographed about 100 times from various angles and then a 3D model is derived from that.

Apparently no photos were taken of us doing the actual Matterport scans. But there are some of us shooting the objects.

Setting up this amazing dinosaur skull for a photogrammetry scan. The skull was spun and photographed 36 times, from a low position (seen here), from a straight on angle and then from a high angle. Jake McCarty, seen on the right in this photo, then prepped the photos for the photogrammetry processing.

This cart has some of the other objects we scanned. The mastodon (or maybe it was a mammoth) jawbone on the bottom unfortunately proved too big to shoot correctly.

Now that the Children’s Museum has completed the metadata they wanted associated with each photogrammetry object, we have embedded them into the scans and the project is finally complete.