Vancouver Mini Maker Faire 2017
Since our inception, the IoT Design Shop has sponsored the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire held every June in the PNE Forum in Vancouver BC. We believe strongly in the mission of the Maker Faire movement, and have been extremely excited to be a part of our local maker community.
Every year, we like to roll out “something new” at the VMMF. In previous years, we used the fair to demonstrate our ConnectionMaker System, to explain SIGNUL to the community, and to bring our award-winning FizViz project back home to show our friends and family.
This year was EPIC! We had something altogether different up our sleeve, and took the opportunity to demonstrate the “Reality Capture System” that we had collaborated with MEC and Finger Food Studios on.
Action Shots
Here’s a gallery of the Reality Capture System in action at Vancouver Mini Maker Faire 2017
What is It For?
As we all know, it can be a very time consuming and expensive process to create 3D models and textures for the digital world. Sometimes, this inhibits the ability to share this information in a digital way altogether – meaning that more travel, shipping, and exchange of physical goods is required to convey shared experience or feedback on items, experiences, people, places, and things.
Our group of collaborators – MEC, Finger Food, and IoT Design Shop believe there are a multitude of applications for a system that allows rapid creation of 3D models from items or places in the real world. Being able to share items and experiences in Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality can increase productivity, reduce carbon emissions, and expand our ability to collaborate around the world.
How Does It Work?
The Reality Capture System is a purpose built photogrammetry rig. It is used to synchronize photo captures from 100 viewpoints in order to generate a photo set that can be used with a photogrammetry system to reconstruct a 3D model based on 2D photographs.
Currently, we feed the photo sets generated by the system into Agisoft Photoscan which is a commercial software product that is very adept at recreating 3D geometry and textures from our 2D image set.
Best in Innovation and Best in Show
To be honest, we had no idea that there was the potential to win awards at the Maker Faire! We brought out the rig because we thought it would inspire people to expand their horizons and think about the possibilities for a system like the RCS.
It turns out that it did just that! In fact, we seem to have reached enough folks that we were voted Best in Innovation, and Best in Show by our fellow makers at the Faire. We were very honoured and humbled to have been recognized by our peers this way, and it was the perfect finale to the big reveal of the system.
We would like to thank all the organizers and volunteers that make the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire possible, and of course, our fellow makers for casting their ballots for our project.