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Posts tagged with: tools

Agisoft PhotoScan

blog header, with images from Agisoft Photoscan

Agisoft PhotoScan (commonly known as PhotoScan) is a professional tool for a photogrammetry pipeline. It performs photogrammetric processing of digital images and generates 3D spatial data. Agisoft Photoscan is the dominant photogrammetric software on the market, being used by a range of professions, from archaeology, cartographers to creators of virtual worlds and game developers. Unlike Visual SfM, it contains a complete program to numerous specific tasks and different types of data, and, as a novice to photogrammetric software, was easily managed, with an efficient workflow system.

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Visual SfM: 3D Construction through Structure from Motion

blog header with text Visual sfm

From reviewing the paper The Untapped Potential of Low Cost Photogrammery in Community-Based Archaeology, it was easy to see that photogrammetry can be used as an alternative to high resolution surveying with high costs.

Traditional softcopy photogrammetric methods require the 3-D location and pose of the camera(s), or the 3-D location of ground control points to be known to facilitate scene triangulation and reconstruction. In contrast, the SfM method solves the camera pose and scene geometry simultaneously and automatically, using a highly redundant bundle adjustment based on matching features in multiple overlapping, offset images [Westoby et al 2012].

Structure from motion is the geometry of creating 3D models from 2D images. If you are interested in the maths behind SfM, visit Prof. Rob Fergus’s lecture notes on Computer Vision, or geometric vision, in particular Lecture 6 on Multiview Stereo & Structure from Motion.  It is quite interesting to see the process. Thankfully, to Wu Changchang, we don’t need to understand the mathematics behind how Structure from Motion works, to be able to use it. In his post-doc year at University of Washington Seattle, he developed Visual SfM.

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Review: Toward Virtual Community Knowledge Evolution

image of a network using ludo pieces

Note: In looking for articles to read, to understand better the mechanics and possibilities of digital technologies that can improve communities both online and offline, I came across this paper, ‘Toward Virtual Community Knowledge Evolution’. Published in 2002, and with the extraordinary rate at which digital technologies change, it seems outdated. However I see it as a classic. The beginning of the road towards collaborative technological advances, and the real value of digital technologies. It was a vision for the future, for digital technology to facilitate knowledge, which meant devising new systems, that would engage and enable users in digital literacies associated within their virtual community. A lot of these features we now take for granted, such as hyperlinks, but in studying the classics, we can realise the excitement as these new systems were developed by people, for people.

Introduction

          Toward Virtual Community Knowledge Evolution is a study carried out by a nine academics, Michael Bieber, Douglas Englebart, Richard Furuta, Starr Roxanne Hiltz, John Noll, Jennifer Preece, Edward A. Stohr, Murray Turoff and Bartel Van De Walle, who lecture in a range of universities, all working and excelling in their areas of computer science and information systems. In this paper, they propose the building of a ‘multimedia document repository’ or digital library, which has unique innovate supports which validates knowledge evolution. A series of tools and technologies based around the concept of community knowledge that can be build-on collectively, to constantly improve the workings of the system. This system, or Collaborative Knowledge Evolution Support System (CKESS), would provide a workflow that can be developed and upgraded through its users; the members who make up the virtual community.

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Photogrammetry Timeline

blog header history of photogrammetry

As part of my research into digital tools and community participation, I have been looking at photogrammetry. In particular because I will be using it as part of the Ogham in 3D project. I realised how little I knew about the history of photogrammetry, and wanted to delve in deeper. As a visual learner, I find just reading articles and papers, still don’t quite connect the dots for me, and constantly find myself muddled with dates and names. So, I decided to create a visual (brief) timeline of the history of photogrammetry, to get a better idea of its origins, its uses, and significance today.

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Digital Storytelling

image of several faces

Digital storytelling is a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story. The media used may include the digital equivalent of film techniques (full-motion video with sound), animation, stills or audio.

Everyone has many powerful stories to tell and people who believe they are mundane, uninteresting, or unmemorable possess beneath this mask a vivid, complex, and rich body of stories just waiting to be told”.- Center for Digital Storytelling

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Voyant Tools

 

image of a graph made using voyant tools

 

Voyant is scholarly project focused on interpreting of texts and design of tools in the humanities. You too can use Voyant to analyze your own texts, to write essays with embedded hermeneutical panels generated by Voyant, and you can adapt the code to create your own versions of tool. (Voyant-Tools)

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Gif-ification

A little Gif about gifs

It is hard to be on social media at the moment without coming across GIFs. But what is a GIF, how has it come to be a widely used format for amateur and professional alike? A GIF is a form of computer image that moves as an animation, because it consists of frames, like a movie with no sound.

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PechaKucha

logo for pechakucha

For one of my modules, Conceptual Introduction to Digital Arts and Humanities, my Christmas assignment consists of a presentation using either the PechaKucha or Ignite format. Fast and fun presentation formats, apparently. I decided to go with PechaKucha because it began in Tokyo, and I am very influenced by all things Japanese. ( ペチャクチャ, means chit-chat).

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Tools

image of a spanner

We can learn more from each other when information is open. A free exchange of ideas is critical to creating an environment where people are allowed to learn and use existing information toward creating new ideas.

Participation and collaboration is a fundamental key to being about to live in a community orientated fair world. Open Source software applies these principles to the development and sharing of new kinds of alternative digital platforms.

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