History in Three Dimensions

Jake Marino

 

 Photo: Direct Dimensions employee using LiDAR to capture the Three Soldiers Vietnam war memorial statue in Washington, D.C.

    This semester I am lucky enough to be interning at a company called Direct Dimensions located in Owings Mills, MD. The company was started by the owner Michael Raphael in the mid-1990s as a metrology company that specialized in digitizing measurements of real-world objects for use in applications like CAD software, and over the years they became one of the premiere companies in the field of 3D scanning. The level of capture they can process is measured in microns at the most advanced level, and they use this skillset for everything from capturing for visual reference to capturing for exact replication and restoration. They have departments focused on specific types of capture, but my position is in the cultural heritage section of the company that works with artwork and historical artifacts and places. They are known very well in this domain due to their high level of technical expertise, doing scanning work for the National Parks Service, the Smithsonian and many other museums all over the country to preserve significant artifacts and aid in restoration as well as digitize items for public display on the internet and information kiosks in the museums themselves.

    My position initially was working on messaging in the cultural heritage space. This came about in a conversation I had during my interview where I talked about how important I thought the work they do is, and over the course of the meeting I laid out some ideas I had regarding working with museums and online institutions like Wikipedia to make scans of important cultural items more accessible. I am still doing that work but the company is inherently technical, so they have allowed me to do some exploratory work on that side as well. I have been able to see what they do for their process, from scanning and taking pictures, to processing of the raw data, to creating and cleaning up models, to presentation and even fabrication. It is incredibly interesting and overall, just super cool from every direction. I’m excited to see what I get to work on and to just be in this space as a preservationist, it’s a great opportunity in a field that most people probably don’t really think about but has very wide applications and huge future potential.