If you've ever taken a human evolution class, chances are you've had a chance to work with the 3D rotational series of hominid bones from the company Bone Clones (if you haven't ever played with the simulations, go do it here; it's pretty incredible). These 3D models solve a fundamental problem in anthropology: there's lots of people that want to study these fossils, but no more than a handful of them to go around. How do we get people the information they need about the fossil while avoiding the sole use of plastic replicas (good for education, but not nearly detailed enough for close study)?
We take the original, take a staggering number of pictures of it, use software to stitch them together, put the program on the internet for everyone to use and voila! You can see the same bones as me at the same digital quality regardless of whether we're in the vault with the original specimen or out in the Great Rift Valley looking for new ones.
I think that the field of entomology could learn a thing or two from the Bone Clone example, and I'm certainly not the only one. This article by Chuong V. Nguyen, David R. Lovell, Matt Adcock, and John La Salle came came out in PLOS ONE last year and is definitely worth the read (I know I plugged it in my last blog post here too; I do not apologize, because it's just that cool). The paper seeks to address the issue that entomologist and anthropologists share; that is, how do you get the delicate specimens to people who need them?
Most museums and universities with insect collections store their collections in large stacking drawers or in air-tight boxes. These are great for long term storage, but what if the person who needs to study the specimens doesn't work at your institution? You're limited in your options; you can try to insulate a package with as much Styrofoam as you like, but the fact of the matter is that you're mailing a brittle, dried husk of chitin and it's probably not going to get to its destination in one piece. You could have the other academic come to your institution, but it's a little ridiculous to have someone come possibly from across the world to see box after box of dead insects. Additionally, it often happens that an institution's collection can get so large it can be difficult to manage, as was the case for the Australian National Insect Collection, whose facilities hold 12 million insect specimens and grow by 100,000 more every year. The paper describes how by digitizing insects we can get around all of these issues. By picking a holotype, or best representative specimen, for each species in a collection the team was able to create detailed images using a fusion of new and old technologies to give crisp, clear and rotatable images of preserved specimens. The team created a system in which a camera takes pictures of an insect (pinned vertically, usually through the anus) at multiple angles. The specimen is placed on a two-axis turntable and lasers are used to guide the movements of the specimen on pan and tilt angles. A program called 3DSOM uses a patterned piece of paper placed beneath the specimen to calculate how many angles are necessary for a given insect.
A simplified diagram of the rig setup.
The secret to this method's success is focal length; pictures taken at the same angle with different focal length can be layered one on top of the other, leading to accurate capture of the insect's color and texture. One rotatable true-color model of an insect can consist of over 5,000 images; the work is well worth it, in my opinion. Look at that definition!
Every single pit and pore! Amazing!
While this not necessarily new technology, it is a substantial improvement over old methods. Some previous methods, such as micro compound tomography (microCT), give a detailed image of the substructure of the insect but may gloss over the fine details like color and texture. Similarly, laser scanning will capture the shape of the insect but isn't able to capture fine details like hairs and may reflect off of iridescent wings or shells.
A and B are the natural color 3D model, and C and D are a microCT reconstruction. E is a photograph of the same specimen at a similar angle.
Just in case this wasn't enough cool technology for you, the company CSIRO (one of the companies that funded the original research) also decided to make 3D printed models of these insects based off the true color models. Using titanium.
I love living in the future.
If you're interested, you can play with some bug models at the Demo page or watch CSIRO's video on the team's work:
Thanks for reading,
-Rebecca
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