The Digital Dungeon

I’ve been considering how to digitize and display objects, mostly because I have an object project that is coming my way. Our original plan was to put a 3D scan of the object on-line, but any 3D scanner that we could afford wasn’t going to be good enough, so I’ve been looking at different options. Option 1-Just pictures We could just take a few pictures of the object with a neutral background and good lighting. In this case we would treat the collection more like an image collection. Option 2- Flash application My husband and I were looking for cameras and we found this site for Olympus cameras . The cameras are ok, but what I was really surprised about was the display! You can click on the camera and move it around, seeing all different sides. Some of my colleges assumed that it was a 3D model, but I could tell that it was just a series of images taken and strung together using a flash application. At work, we are working on implementing this for at least our first object collection. ...

People have brought the problem up many times that it would be better if we could display images dynamically and be able to zoom in. A quick and easy solution is Zoomify EZ (which is free) or other more expensive versions of Zoomify that have more features. Zoomify will work with high resolution images relatively quickly. It works by saving the image in a mosaic of smaller images at different resolutions. It only deals with a few sections of the image at a time instead of dealing with the whole image, so there is very little lag. The speed is determined more by the computer and the internet connection than the size of the image itself. With this software, the level of zoom is determined by the DPI of the image. It will allow someone to zoom in till the section they are viewing has reached the original DPI. Since the free version of Zoomify uses flash, it also helps to prevent people from downloading the image. This can be a problem if your goal is to share the pictures. You will...