Portable, Super-high-resolution 3-D Imaging 31
An anonymous reader writes "At SIGGRAPH 2011, a team of researchers from MIT presented a clever method for measuring microscopic surface structure using a rubber sensor, a camera, and a set of lights. This technology could have applications to industrial inspection, dermatology, and even forensic ballistics."
Some what similar (Score:4, Interesting)
This is somewhat similar to how some artists obtain normal maps for textures.
They go and take source pictures of materials (bricks, grass, what ever), then for each photo they bring a light and shine a light on the scene from four different directions. This allows you to obtain the height information later on back at the PC. This gives you a realistic normal map for the surfaces you've been taking references of. Now, the problem being that this only works with surface deformations of a certain height. Also the angle you place the light at determines how "bumpy" the normal map is going to be. I presume those issues are worked out in the MIT device, but this works for nearly flat surfaces best.... anything else and you'll get "shadows" of objects overlapping each other.
The resolution and scale are what most impress me here though. :)