More news!!!! Let's see we've got Museum archiving, 3D Television, 3D Film Conversion, Medical Imaging... not to mention the potential in Video Game development and 3D copiers. Is this the Microsoft of the 2000's ?????
Smithsonian, Centro Alameda Museums Team With Synthonics in First-of-Its-Kind
Preservation Project
BusinessWire, Tuesday, June 16, 1998 at 10:08
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 16, 1998--
New 3-D Imaging Process Provides Educators, Students With
Unprecedented Access to Seldom-Seen Museum Artifacts
Synthonics Technologies (OBB:SNNT) Tuesday announced that the
company has delivered three-dimensional (3-D) digital images of
priceless artifacts housed at the Smithsonian Institution in a
first-of-its-kind project that will allow people around the world to
view and interact with fragile and irreplaceable museum artifacts.
Transforming a Cold War defense technology into what could become
a mainstream education tool to be accessed via the Internet,
Synthonics has produced fully interactive 3-D digital replicas of
seldom-seen wood carvings for Centro Alameda, the Smithsonian's San
Antonio, Texas-based museum affiliate.
The wood statues are part of the Smithsonian's Teodoro Vidal
collection of "Santos," icons revered by the Latino community as part
of their cultural and religious history. Once objects are converted to
accurate 3-D digital replicas, students, scholars, researchers and the
general public can interact with museum artifacts via the Internet on
a standard PC any time, anywhere in the world.
Synthonics' proprietary technology can be embedded in any
software program and costs far less than any comparable 3-D imaging
method on the market.
Inexpensive Educational Tool
Synthonics' proprietary technology allows students or researchers
with a computer to inspect artifacts as if they were holding the
priceless object in their hands.
After downloading the image and a viewer from a Web site, they
can use a standard computer mouse to manipulate the three-dimensional
image to see the front, sides, back or base, enlarge a portion of the
object to see detail, perform point-to-point measurements or even
inspect critical elements below the surface, much like an X-ray image
displays bones inside the body.
"With our technology, museum curators or anyone with a collection
of objects anywhere in the world can finally take their most prized
artifacts off the shelf or out of storage and virtually place them in
the hands of students, teachers, researchers and the public in 3-D for
a fraction of the cost of other available technologies," said Mike
Budd, president and chief executive officer, Synthonics Technologies.
"We've created an affordable tool that will revolutionize
education and distance learning by allowing important or rare art
treasure, delicate objects and historic items to be shared by
libraries, brought into classrooms or downloaded directly to homes
for people to enjoy and study."
Visitors never see 90 percent of the artifacts and exhibits
housed in the major museums around the world, because many are too
fragile or the institutions simply don't have enough display space.
"Our technology now lets museums open up their collections via
the Internet to literally anyone with a PC," Budd added.
Latino Cultural Exhibits Planned
The digital replicas of the Santos will be used by Centro
Alameda, a civic organization chartered to create a local arts and
entertainment district, to promote research and the study of Latino
culture at the Centro de Artes Museum now under development in
downtown San Antonio. The facility has been designated as an affiliate
museum of the Smithsonian.
Centro Alameda President Henry Munoz sees the Synthonics 3-D
replica imaging as key to the success of San Antonio's museum program.
"The work we are doing with Synthonics is essential to our plans
for the Centro Alameda project -- the creation in San Antonio of an
international center for Latino arts and culture, to showcase and
study important art and historical objects from around the world," he
said.
"The significance of the company's 3-D imaging technology and
the database project we are undertaking together cannot be overstated.
Synthonics' technology guarantees the preservation of fragile
artifacts for future generations interested in Latino cultures."
Synthonics' 3-D digital replicas of Santos were shown to the
academic world in San Antonio in May at "Icons of Devotion, Images of
Identity," a global educational conference on the importance of the
Virgin Mary in the Latino culture. Attendees praised the demonstration
as the unveiling of a new era in distance learning.
"Academic researchers and distance learning experts see the leap
ahead this technology will provide," Budd said. "Once our tools have
become embedded in more software programs, educators can share and
confer on objects worldwide."
Future Work With the Smithsonian
The Santos project is the first of a series of collaborations
between Synthonics and the Smithsonian Institution. Synthonics,
through its Christopher Raphael subsidiary, has been commissioned to
create a CD-ROM containing 3-D digital replicas of seldom-seen
artifacts, fine art and other objects from each of the Smithsonian's
16 diverse museums and the National Zoo. The CD-ROM will be available
this fall.
Copyright 1998, Business Wire
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