Sorry for the delayed post guys! Time passes quickly here :)

I've been taking lectures for the past two weeks and was given some tasks to attend to during my free time. Many things are happening around here and posting about each is pretty much impractical.

To put my news in short, I moved into a shared flat with other International students (no more stays at hotels), met a number of friends, went on a couple of trips around Newcastle, and best of all: got a broadband Internet connection at my place! :D

Anyway, here are the details, starting with the incidents that were mentioned at the end of the previous post ...

An Evening at a Bar

Victor is a Spanish undergraduate student that I met during my first week at the university. He studies music at Newcastle and has invited me to a "Jam Night" at one of the local bars. He said that this bar holds Thursday evenings for jamming sessions and that many bands and solo artists perform there every week.

I made it there that Thursday and watched some bands perform; the evening was amazing! Anybody who wants to play would simply write their names on a chalkboard and wait for their turn. The songs  played ranged from country to some rock oldies, in addition to few originals.

Victor was expecting me to bring my guitar and jam along, but I told him I've been in town for a couple of days and it's not the right time ... yet ;)

Luckily, I got away with my vile no-drinking habit that evening with a simple "Sorry, I have a medical condition, I can't drink" :P

 The Tap

This happened during my first week too! I was heading someplace for dinner when a girl got almost ran over trying to cross the street to my side while yelling "Hey! Hey!".

She looked terrified and asked me if I can get her "a tap". I asked her "What's a tap?" and she acted out smoking a cigarette. I figured that a tap is slang for a cigarette! She said "I can't buy it because the guy at the supermarket thinks am a minor but my 18th birthday was just yesterday!".

Now in normal conditions, if somebody approaches me with such a proposition,  my reaction would range from simple refusal to beating them to death :P, but this girl really did crack me up! :D

So yes, I went to the supermarket and bought her a tap (how responsible). She gave me a pound and asked for the change but I didn't want to bother counting the pennies so I just told her "It's on me" and she was like "Ooooooh" and she hugged me :S

Of course I didn't let her go without some lecturing about the risks of smoking but she looked like a lost cause, or else I wouldn't have saved myself the hassle of denying her request.

Trip to Tynemouth

A couple of weeks ago I went with some friends to Tynemouth, a town at the mouth of the river Tyne at the east coast of England.

We passed by the historical Tynemouth Castle, a castle that stands on a high rocky cliff and is believed to have been there since the 10th century (making it 1000 years old). Anyway, embare7 wella el youm, it looked nothing more than a deserted bunch of stones to me :F

Hello everybody, this is to let you all know that I’ve arrived safely and am currently doing just fine in Newcastle, UK!

My trip to Newcastle was great. I had a five-hour stop at London’s reputable Heathrow airport, one of the world’s largest airports, which was such a nice opportunity to look around. I’ve wandered for hours but couldn’t see but a tiny portion of the airport. Heathrow is so big that people use metros to travel from one terminal to another!

My flight to Newcastle was a little bit delayed so I arrived late, unpacked and fell to bed. I woke up the next morning and took a walk around, checking up the places and the routes. My WLAN-equipped mobile phone and Google Maps are really doing me a great service here; I can locate any place and determine the best route to it with only few clicks on my mobile phone! :D

Next week will be our last in our training at KADDB. Our 3D Laser Scanner is now completed and we're adding the final touches. The scanner has undergone tremendous upgrades and is now performing way better than it used to last month.

To put it in short, during the past month we've managed to complete multiple viewpoint scanning and 3D mapping. The device can now automatically capture data from multiple views of the object and merge these sets of data to form a complete 3D model.

We've corrected serious bugs related to surface sampling. We've also programmed algorithms to compensate for inaccurate calibrations and instrument errors. Using these and some additional tweaks we've raised the maximum sampling rate to an amazing 6.66 samples/mm while cutting half the scan time!

The models we're producing now are extremely accurate and look amazing.

Take a look ...

Hello everyone,

It's been a tiring month. My friends and I have finally acquired the components of our 3D Laser Scanner and we've been busy with it ever since. It's only been few days since we were able to actually do a 3D scan and I thought I'd post some shots here.

For those of you who did not catch up with me lately, I am currently building a device that creates a 3D computer model for any real world object. Two of my friends are working with me on this project, which counts as my university summer training.

The device uses a high precision laser sensor to sample the surface of an object and produce a data set known as a Point Cloud. A special data processing software is then used to convert the point cloud into a polygon based model of the object, a process known as Reconstruction.

We’ve assembled the device in a temporary frame that allows us to perform scans till we complete the final assembly. Our first scanned object was a 7x5 cms Garfield toy. We scanned one face of the toy with 3 samples per millimeter resolution. The obtained point cloud was pretty impressive:


The point cloud itself clearly depicts the shape of the scanned object. This is because the high sampling rate makes points appear to be a continuous surface by themselves :)

Also, reconstructing the above point cloud into the polygon based model was better than I expected. Normally, trying to reconstruct a single face scan will result in many "holes" in the object surface due to the low sampling rate of surfaces that fall perpendicular to the direction of the laser beam.

Combining multiple face scans will resolve this problem as surfaces that are perpendicular to the direction of laser from one viewpoint will actually be scanned from multiple viewpoints allowing them to be sampled properly.

Anyway, with those great results, we moved to scan a much larger object. We chose a big car that measured about 50 cm x 50 cm. We scanned a single face with the same resolution of the toy and the results were astonishing.


  
Scanning a model this big makes one appreciate the high resolution of sampling. The produced point cloud was so dense that you could barely see through. Another interesting observation is that the laser sensor was able to sample the windshield, which is made of a transparent material.

This scan took approximately 11 hours, and resulted in a super high-quality output. Below are rendered shots of the car model.


All the above models were scanned from a single view angle. It hasn’t been until Thursday that we were able to capture multiple shots and merge them into a single 3D model.

Am sorry because I couldn't post pictures of the device or explain how it works. It is still too early to publish this type of information on the Internet. We still need to wait till the project is over, after which we'll be able to publish all the cool details :)