prototype Archives ⋆ X-Reality: University of Michigan XR

May 26, 2015June 29, 2022

The Kelsey Museum – Visualizing Lost Cylinder Seals

2D illustration of one of the seal imprints used to generate a 3D model

The Kelsey Museum houses a collection of more than 100,000 ancient and medieval objects from the civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Near East. Margaret Root, curator of the Greek and Near Eastern Collections at the Kelsey Museum, came to the Duderstadt Center with the impressions of several ancient cylinder seals. A cylinder seal is a small cylindrical tool, about one inch long, used in ancient times to engrave symbols or marks. When rolled in wet clay, the seal would leave an impression equivalent to a person’s “signature.” These signatures were commonly used to sign for goods when trading. Some of the earliest cylinder seals were found in the Mesopotamian region.The Kelsey Museum wanted to re-create these seals from the impressions to generate 3D prototypes or for use in a digital exhibit. These exhibits would allow visitors to the Kelsey to experience the cylinder seal tradition first-hand by providing seals and clay to roll their own impressions. The problem was these seals tend to get lost over time so the museum did not have the original seals, only the imprints.

To recover the seal’s three-dimensional form, Margaret Root provided the Duderstadt Center with an outline of the imprints in Adobe Illustrator. From the outline, Stephanie O’Malley of the Duderstadt Center added varying amounts of grey to generate a depth map, where the darkest areas were the most inset and the lightest areas were the most protruding. With a depth map in place she was then able to inset areas on a cylindrical mesh in Zbrush (a 3d sculpting software) to re-create what the cylinder seal (the example seal is the “queen’s seal” ) would have looked like. Shawn O’Grady has printed one of these seals already.

A 3D render of the re-created cylinder seal.

The Duderstadt Center has since obtained the new Projet 3D printer, and plans are now underway to eventually print one of these on the Projet since it has a much higher print resolution and these seals are typically quite small.

To check out more at the Kelsey Museum, click here.

June 2, 2011September 30, 2020

Pisidian Antioch

From January 13 to February 24, 2006 at the Duderstadt center on the University of Michigan north campus, the Kelsey Museum mounted an exhibition on the Roman site of Antioch of Pisidia in Asia Minor (Turkey)—a Hellenistic city refounded by Augustus in 25 BC as a Roman colony. Located along a strategic overland artery between Syria and the western coast of Asia Minor, Pisidian Antioch served Rome’s military needs but also presented a striking symbol, from the Roman perspective, of the benefits that Roman civilization provided to local populations. The city is best known to the modern world as a destination on the first missionary journey of St. Paul and Barnabas in the 1st century AD, recounted in the Book of Acts.

Held at the Duderstadt Center Gallery on North Campus, the exhibition featured a physical model created with a University of Michigan Duderstadt Center’s Rapid Prototyping servces. Digital reconstructions of the buildings and topography, which were created with the help of internal staff working with talented students associated with the project, were displayed using the Virtual Reality MIDEN which conveyed a sense of the original monumentality of the site and the character of its setting.

January 2, 2006September 30, 2020

Virtual Prototyping of Classrooms – Business School

The designing of architectural spaces provides unique challenges, especially when those spaces are intended to serve specific functions as well. The Ross School of Business recently constructed a new building which strived to meet the needs of the school’s faculty and students. Within the new construction was a plan for new U shaped classrooms. Since the design was unlike what many have used in the past and their effectiveness during daily classes was in question, the School of Business planned to construct test sites so faculty could experience the room before it was built. These test sites were typical of movie sets costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. If changes needed to be made, the site would need to be reconstructed to the new plans.

Dean Graham Mercer, approached the University of Michigan Duderstadt Center looking for a more cost effective solution to identifying problems in the design earlier on. Through the use of the Virtual Reality MIDEN, which has the distinct ability to display virtual worlds at true 1-to-1 scale, faculty from the School of Business was able to experience the proposed classrooms prior to the physical construction of the space and offer suggestions with confidence. This process cost the school a fraction of building physical test sites and allowed for rapid turn around on any additions they needed.

The new classrooms can now be seen in the Ross School of Business on Central Campus.