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May 20, 2015 | By Alec

Everyone who has spent hours designing their own 3D printable creations will have reached that one point where they dream of owning a 3D scanner. Unfortunately, the good scanners tend to be extremely expensive while the cheaper ones don’t exactly result in detailed 3D printable files. But it looks like a third option is just around the corner, as a team of Spanish scientists have successfully developed a 3D scanner capable of transforming 2D surfaces consisting of multiple layers into 3D objects. Just imagine the 3D printing possibilities this offers.

This scanner has been developed by a team of researchers from the University of Oviedo in northern Spain, and as they explain to euronews, the secret to their technique is graphene. Now this carbon material is already heading towards a bright future in 3D printing, but the Spanish engineers employ it for a very different reason. ‘Graphene acts as a frequency multiplier. It is able to generate higher frequency signals out of lower frequencies, in a relatively easy way. Graphene also allows us to go deeper into the work of art, and to identify the chemical composition of its materials,’ telecommunications engineer Samuel Ver Hoeye explains.

This graphene scanner is capable of, like any other scanner, combine lots of photographes, but then of the frequencies. Combined with image processing techniques, this is capable of generating 3D images ‘hidden’ away in 2D objects. As computer scientist Yannick Franken revealed, this technique can even bring forth the real colours of paintings that have been lost over time or painted over. ‘What you see [below] is the real colour of the works of art. It has been virtually illuminated, and virtually recorded by a camera. Technically the most challenging part is to combine all the individual scans. These scans need to be automatically aligned. And if that is not perfectly done, within a 0.2 millimetre accuracy, then we get really bad colour reconstruction,’ he says.

The initial results are also definitely encouraging. Tests in one Spanish museum already yielded very interesting 3D images from centuries-old paintings, revealing different color layers and even the number 34 painted in the background for some reason. ‘We can discover the depth of the varnish and the colour layers. We can see if there were preliminary drawings beneath the actual painting, and what the materials used for those drawings were. We are also trying to see if the scanner is also able to identify the different materials inside the painting, like varnishes, binders and pigments,’ conservator Marta Flórez Igual told reporters.

It is especially useful for art restorers who can thus easily look into paintings to see various layers and materials in a painting before going in. However, its 3D printing potential hardly needs emphasizing as well, as these 3D images can easily be 3D printed as well. Perhaps a whole new way of engaging with art can be created? At any rate, it’s a very versatile scanner that adds a whole new dimension to engaging with objects. ‘Existing scanners for works of art are currently very expensive. Our technology has been designed to be much cheaper. It results in a compact, lighter scanner that can easily be transported to museums or laboratories to study objects,’ project coordinator Javier Gutiérrez Meana explained.

While the scanner is still under development (expected to become a market reality within five years), a number of interesting user applications are already being imagined. One option is to use the graphene scanner to develop an augmented reality smartphone app to enable museum visitors to engage with art in a deeper way. In that respect, 3D printed recreations of 2D paintings would definitely be a cool option too.

Euronews report on the graphene 3D scanner.

 

 

Posted in 3D Scanning

 

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