9420321 DeWitt This project is to design and build a prototype device capable of digitizing and displaying three dimensional surfaces. The device will exploit diffraction optics which has been shown to offer smaller package sizes and higher resolution than other three dimensional surface acquisition methods. The prototype will be for hand-held scanning and has a handle that is grasped by the operator. Lines of visible light projected from the working end of the device indicate a window of acquisition. The prototype will be sensitive from point-of-contact to over six centimeters away. A wire connection the device to a computer will be its only restriction of movement in free space. The prototype scanner will be assembled in the first year of the project. Testing and demonstration of the scanner will require appropriate display methods. Data from a freely positioned hand-held scanner form an incoherent "cloud" of voxels which must be sorted. The data will be parsed by a content-addressable algorithm modeled on a parallel computer (Aspex PIPE). The resulting PIPE program will then be ported to a personal computer platform for commercialization. A binary tree partition algorithm will also be developed to export three dimensional data from the scanner to polygon-based three dimensional graphics programs.
