Scientist at the University of Aberdeen are using 3D imaging software to create interactive models of mummies and other ancient artifacts.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00We have a number of cat mummies in the collection and this was a nice one.
00:04Basically what we're doing is looking at some items in the University
00:07collection to make more use of them for teaching. So using photogrammetry and
00:12other techniques we're able to create virtual versions of objects which
00:16otherwise just you can't handle other than a specialist coming in and
00:19looking at them. We're really looking at things that will be relevant to students of
00:23medicine and maybe archaeology as well but also thinking some of the objects in
00:27the museum that are rather intriguing and attractive that would get people
00:29attention. You are able to get that ability to look very closely so it's not
00:33just a representation of the object, it's being able to look at the detail and
00:36really understand it. That's been really important. The question of course always
00:40is what's inside it? Is it actually a cat mummy or not? There are cases where what's
00:45inside is not what you'd expect. We did actually have a crocodile mummy and all
00:49that was in it was the crocodile's head, there was no body. So we wanted to know
00:53so we were able to create this representation of it so we've got a real
00:57sense of the outside and then also we cat scanned it and it's a bad pun but
01:01never mind and we discovered inside that the real cat is a tiny wee kitten
01:06much much smaller than the bandages so presumably what went on was that
01:10actually at a temple they were selling mummified cats for people to
01:14give as a gift to the temple and you'd make more money out of selling a large
01:19cat than a little one so they've bulked it out. I think it does give a bit of an
01:22insight into what was going on in a temple of you know daily life and how
01:26they were making offerings to the gods and etude.
01:29Photogrammetry is a technique for building 3D models from photographs so
01:34basically it consists in taking a lot of photographs around an object and then
01:39using a clever piece of software to stitch them all together and build a 3D
01:43model and the result is very good. The textures are very realistic so anyone
01:50can rotate the model zoom into the object and explore the texture and the
01:57shape of the 3D model at any device. On the one hand we're thinking of the
02:02students in University of Aberdeen and their chance to really make use of the
02:06collections I mean it's a wonderful privilege being a student in Aberdeen
02:09when you've got the collection and we need to make more use of it. The other
02:12thing of course is we're able to web mount them so they're going to be
02:15available to anybody who wants to see these things and there are a number of
02:19international projects looking at things like cat mummies so we're
02:22contributing to international scholarship as well as our own teaching.