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Historic places and artifacts have much to offer students who are learning
about Roman times. Barring a trip to Italy, though, how do you bring those
sites and sculptures into the classroom? Professor and Chair of Classics Roger Ulrich ’77 has long
been interested in creative ways to employ technology and recently used support
from a computing technology venture
fund to build a stereographic camera that would allow him to take paired
photos he could transform into “virtual” three-dimensional images.
Professor of Classics Roger Ulrich ’77 at a site in Italy, with the camera he
used to create 3-D images for his students back in Hanover. (Photo courtesy of
Roger Ulrich)
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“I wanted students to have the experience you get in an IMAX theater,” says
Ulrich, “to help them visualize spatial relationships that are so fundamental
to how we perceive the world.”
Ulrich rigged up two digital cameras into a single apparatus with one camera
right side up and the other upside down. “Because the lenses are slightly
offset, aligning one of them upside down from the other moves them closer
together, creating a distance that’s similar to the one between your eyes,” he
says.
In 2007, he traveled to Italy and France and gathered his images. Once back
in Hanover, Ulrich used special software and, with help from Tom Garbelotti at
the Arts and Humanities Resource Center, created the effect he was looking
for.
Andrew Faunce of Classroom
Technology Services then helped Ulrich set up an experimental space in a
seminar room at Dartmouth’s Hood
Museum. They used twin projection cameras with polarizing filters and a
special silver reflective screen.
A permanent installation of the 3-D display technology is being completed in
106 Reed Hall and Ulrich plans to use it in future archaeology courses. He also
will share the new technology at reunion with Alumni College attendees in a
course titled “Classrooms of the Future.”
By SUSAN WARNER
The Computing Technology Venture Fund
Since 1993, the Computing
Technology Venture Fund has awarded grants to faculty looking to apply
technology to the Dartmouth curriculum. Proposals are being accepted for this
year’s funding period until May 15. For more information, contact Malcolm Brown, director of
academic computing.
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