This past summer, I was beginning to brainstorm ideas for a senior thesis. I didn’t expect to think up anything worthwhile, but I gained inspiration while stumbling across some astounding Scanning Electron Microscope imagery online. I didn’t know what photogrammetry was at the time, but I thought I’d seen somewhere that pictures could be taken from many perspectives around and object and combined into a 3D model. It was a shot in the dark, but I wondered if I could accomplish the same feat on a microscopic scale using an SEM. With those models (if I can create them), I want to create a museum in virtual reality that shrinks the user down to the size of these organisms.

I contacted the SEM lab at the University of Maine and immediately found guidance and enthusiasm in the lab’s technician, Kelly Edwards. With a grant from the New Media department, I selected a fire ant specimen and  began taking images like this around it:

After over fifty pictures were taken, I uploaded them AutoDesk Remake – AutoDesk’s own photogrammetry software in 2017. Sadly, what it rendered out looked absolutely nothing like my specimen. In fact, it was pretty much just a flat, gray plane in the viewer.

I scoured the internet for any resources on the subject and, long story short, got in contact with Professor Valerio Rizzo who is a registered AutoDesk Collaborator. He also happens to be a neuroscience professor at the University of Palermo, head of a 3D-printing prosthetics lab, and a contributor to Realities.io (a VR steam game). Bar none one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met. He agreed to help me with my project using his own software and ended up creating this model with my images:

It’s incomplete, but it’s a great start. With help from the photogrammetry community and a brand new, powerful workstation on campus (with a GTX Titan graphics card) I’ll be able to sequence these images and those of other specimens on my own using the newly released AutoDesk ReCap Pro Photo software.