Lab 6 Week 6 Zander Kim

Figure 1 – Dixon house from the front side (facing the street)

This is Dixon House, one of the draw houses at Carleton College. The house is split into 2 separate apartments, a triple and a sextet. This house is one of the ones before all of the new renovations happened.

Figure 2 – Embedded HTML from Sketchfab of my work in Metashape Pro (Dixon Wall by Zander Kim on Sketchfab)

Figure 3 – Embedded HTML from Sketchfab of my work in Scaniverse (Dixon Model by Zander Kim on Sketchfab)

This was probably the most painstaking experience I have ever had in this class. For the Metashape model, the camera aligning refused to work no matter how many points I set, how many settings I adjusted or how many tutorials I looked up. This really taught me that even if you have all of the software pictures and tools to model something, sometimes you just need to have a lot of experience with it to actually make something. The software was not entirely beginner friendly, as if we did not walk through it in class, I would have absolutely no idea what I was doing. For the phone app, it was really awkward explaining what I was doing to people that lived in the house, but it went a lot better than the computer software. The main issue that I ran into while using it was that the range was extremely limited, I could only reach to the top of the first floor with the base scan, limiting my scan to just the first level of the house. Additionally, it was a bit difficult to get around the landscape and trees to take scans of the buildings. It did make it a lot easier to capture the angles that I wanted however, so that is a positive.

I believe that if 3D modeling is done right, it can accomplish miles more than any picture or video. Being able to interact with a model allows the learner to look at niche details that an image doesn’t include, and look at multiple different angles or frames in context of one another. For maps, a regular map tells you where you are going, and how to navigate, but a 3D model of a city shows the context of what the city is like. Historians can use this to visualize the external factors to an event in an area, and regular citizens can use it to plan travel and see what their experiences will be like. For education as a whole, 3D modeling is helpful to really create an immersive learning environment, allowing students to feel as if they are actually a part of what they are learning about.

This process does absolutely encourage looking closer and noticing the small details. Not only is it very noticeable when something is missing from the model, but details are the whole point of photogrammetry. When you don’t capture something, whether it be under a balcony, or a frame of the garden, the software lets you know. This forces the user to go up to the detail, and forces acknowledgement. From a analysis standpoint, usually visits to historical sites are limited by location and time, so being able to view a 3D model with every detail should increase the analytical capabilities of historians.