That was fun!
On 25.3. and 28.3. In 2022, as part of our "digital preservation of monuments" offer, we digitized historical and contemporary monuments with two 8th graders from the KAV grammar school in Celle using photogrammetry and thus filled the KAV grammar school's brand new Sketchfab account.
The background
In many cities there are remarkable cultural monuments. These are constantly exposed to wind and weather, they erode and the municipalities usually lack the money and opportunities to preserve these monuments.
Photogrammetry can be used to create high-resolution, digital twins in 3D and thus the status quo of an object can be permanently preserved digitally.
The preparation
A big thank you goes to the management of the KAV high school and to the teachers Philipp Perschel and Wolfram Steinmetz, who took up the topic so enthusiastically and prepared it with their classes. (By the way, these preparations also included creating accounts at Sketchfab.com and CapturingReality.com)
Together we developed a first guide and the students were introduced to the topic in preparatory lessons.
The students not only came to the project days curious and motivated, but also consistently produced results that exceeded expectations.
The participants
We carried out this project with two 8th graders on two days. The classes were divided into groups of about four students each and at the beginning of the day each group took photos of the objects independently.
Together with the teachers we joined one or the other group to give tips and hints.
The city of Celle and the objects
The city of Celle is full of relics from the past and so it was not difficult for the students to find suitable objects. The diverse mix of old and contemporary objects has proven to be a good balance.
Centuries-old fountains stand next to bronzes from the 1980s.
Ad Rem!
We had set up a powerful computer in a school computer room on which RealityCapture was installed.
After 60-90 minutes of taking photos, the groups of students gradually came back and started copying the photos from their smartphones onto USB sticks.
We then gradually fed RealityCapture with the contents of these sticks.
On site, we then initiated the alignment and reconstruction of the models in draft mode in RealityCapture.
In some cases, the results of these two steps still provided indications of where there were still "photo gaps". And the corresponding groups were then able to return to their objects in order to precisely close these gaps.
In total, many thousands of photos were produced and 13 objects from 3 centuries were digitally conserved.
The results can be viewed on Sketchfab here:
learning
Good preparation is also the be-all and end-all here!
The students knew how best to photograph for photogrammetry, they had preliminarily selected objects that we had checked together for their suitability.
A handout was available that summarized the most important aspects.
As expected, copying the photos to the USB sticks was a bit bumpy here and there – but in the end it worked for all groups, so that no results were lost.
With one day of instruction each, we got on well in this constellation.
If you want to go into the subject of 3D data and photogrammetry even more, it would be a good idea to present or reproduce the theory for half a day.
Conclusion
The important things first:
It was fun, the results were convincing and everyone involved was inspired and left the project days positive.
In principle, the topic of "3D data" is in good hands in a school, since competence in this regard is of course becoming increasingly important for students in times of AR/VR and metaverses.
Both the Kulturschokolade team and the teachers at the KAV Gymnasium encouraged the course and results of these two days to pursue and develop this topic further.
We look forward to the next steps and would like to thank everyone involved again - especially the students who were so committed and achieved such remarkable results.
Here it goes to the corresponding project homepage of the KAV Gymnasium.
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