Paul Debevec is perhaps the most influential of the pioneers of photogrammetry techniques (and holograms… and hdrs / exrs… and… ) and I can’t imagine anyone who has a greater understanding of the information contained in light and how to access it. Now you can learn from the master. fxphd is offering access to its courses – including interviews with Paul Debevec – for only $199. Worth. It.

Read more about it here, and soak up Mike Seymour’s video interview with Paul discussing the infamous light stage.

Yes, visions of Heinrich piloting a copter-cam along the mounted sauropod vertebrae in the Naturkundemuseum’s main hall pop into my head when reading this… and stick with me like a catchy pop tune. I’ll have to build him a pilot’s cap with a Giraffatitan print on it and augmented reality goggles ala Bladerunner so that it’s even cooler when I come to visit.

Where will all this photogammetry lead? Well, Smithsonian is forging ahead with 3D printing its collection to increase public access. It’s only a matter of time before museums offer variable scale dinosaur skeletons for home printing. Where do I order?

With all the progress in photogammetry going on (visit here, or at Heinrich‘s for more) one wonders how the front end of all the created digital forms might look, how accessible and exchangeable the created meshes might be. Ideally, there would be a system:

• accessible via internet
• without the need to install plugins
• which would allow for extensive meta-tagging
• even at the level of vertice-based hot-spots
• and meta-linkable with other web-based services such as Mike Keesey’s PhyloPic
• ultimately becoming a navigable, indexable 3D library networked with scientific pdfs, blogs and phylogenetic trees.

Well, that’s a tall order. With all these ideas in mind, I point you to p3d. Here’s a guide for more information. Apparently, a good number of the above-mentioned criteria are met: a social platform with image, video and 3D mesh support with extensive meta-tagging opportunities that requires no plug-in. Now… where’s the vertice-based hot-linking?

How do you get the best photos of that wonderful mount? With all the problems of lighting, camera distortion, parallax and composition, well… you may soon just be photosculpting it. Check out Andrew Plumb’s camera phone composition with automated 3D cloud thanks to Hyper3D. More at thingaverse.