relightablephotobooth
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Relightable Dome creates interactive images where you control the light source
Stitching together a bunch of images to create a single picture is hardly a new concept. Panoramas are old hat, and Google is even using 360-degree photos to help guide your shopping decisions. But a team of students at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, with the help of a few others, are taking a slightly different approach. The Relightable Dome, or Relightable Photobooth, uses Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technology which captures an object or person under a variety of lighting conditions then combine it into a single, interactive photo. Inside the box is a concave surface studded with 81 LED flashes. A custom microcontroller inside triggers each flash in sequence and a camera mounted at the rear captures an image at each stop. And, while the enclosure is custom, the camera doesn't need to be. At the back is simply a bracket that practically any shooter can be mounted on, though in this case it was a Canon DSLR. The pictures are then stitched together on a laptop using a piece of open source software and a special algorithm to create an interactive image where you control the light source. The whole process, from triggering the first flash to final file takes less than five minutes.
