Creating The First 3D Scan of an Endangered Species | Explorers In The Field

[Music] Things are disappearing at an increasing rate, both animals and cultural sites. 3D scanning is a way to digitally capture the world and make a copy of something. My personal mission is to build technologies to help explore the worlds and the disappearing things around us, whether they're cultural heritage sites, archaeology sites, or the natural world. [Music]

Come here! Even here in Indonesia, I don't think a lot of people have seen the Sumatran rhino. The bars are nice and wide apart, so the cameras will be able to look through them. We won't have to see any of the bars, and the tarp over the top will keep the cameras dry if it starts raining. Being able to use this scan as an education and outreach tool to get everyone excited about saving this animal is a great use of the technology.

We're using a technique for 3D scanning called photogrammetry. We're taking many, many photographs and merging them together to get 3D depth perception. It's because of 3D cam... this is actually the first animal that we've tried to 3D scan, and being the Sumatran rhino, a very important, critically endangered animal, is a pretty high bar to set for us.

Now we'll get all the super clamps on them, and then we'll mount the cameras, and we'll do a focus test. The LED lighting... see what we got. Sounds good? Cool!

All right, so doing a 3D scannable live animal is very different than doing a stationary object. With the live animal, it moves. This is changing its 3D geometry enough that you can't just use a single camera. What you have to do is capture all the images that you're going to use to stitch into 3D at once. You big beautiful animals! Oh, did you hear them? You might have seen something fierce!

So the solution is an array of cameras. We put together 18 cameras that are all triggered so they fire exactly at the same millisecond. We can basically freeze time and have all of these images of the rhino at the exact same instant, so we can build these into a 3D model. Don't super worry about exactly where they're set yet; that's pretty good.

These cameras are spread approximately equally in three rows, and all of those cameras come back to central boxes, which are triggering each camera at once when we press a single remote. Yup, these ones! 800-kilogram rhino, just totally cooperating and doing this crazy dance to get scanned.

So beyond just doing a single capture, we freeze the animal in time. We're doing other analysis in video, like animal gait analysis, so we can see how the rhino moves. We can see how its head moves, its leg moves, its tails, its ears. We'll be able to take these scans and actually animate it, so we'll have a rhino that looks photorealistic that's walking around the way that it actually moves and how its musculature and skin moves with it. I'm actually surprised that the fur and stuff on the back didn't do us that bad.

[Music] Leave the posts where they are, though! That's his favorite ear scratching post right there too.

So once we have this data all processed and our artists clean it up and make it look perfect, the end application here is that we can have a digital copy of this rhino that can be fully articulated, moving around in 3D space. You can put on a headset and stand next to the Sumatran rhino and be one of the few people that have ever been able to do that, being able to look at it from all sides.

Being able to walk up and look in the animal's eye creates an emotional connection that's beyond what you can get from a flat video or photograph. The ultimate application of this will be to bring the rhino to everyone. [Music] You.