Mirroring Condor Flights in California

In this interactive project for California State Parks installed at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park (JPBSP), the visitor uses their outstretched arms to soar as a California Condor above Big Sur.  The visitors use their bodies to bank, dive and lift in virtual 3D space as they follow flight paths from actual California Condors. Our…

No Spectators: VR recording at the Smithsonian

  Led by Nora Atkinson and Sara Snyder at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, INSIGHT joined forces with Greg Downing of Hyperacuity, Raj Puran at Intel Corporation, and Jason Gholston at Sansar Studios  to create a VR experience as part of the Renwick Gallery’s 2018 exhibition No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man. The team…

Rebuilding an Acanthus Column in Delphi

Jean-Luc Martinez, an archaeologist with the Musée du Louvre, asked the INSIGHT team to help document and reconstruct a fragmentary column from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece.  The goal of the reconstruction was to validate Martinez’ hypothesis that the Omphalos (a well-known sculpture meant to mark the ‘center’ of the Hellenic world) once…

Making a Digital Twin for a Maya Stela

To document this stela with Queen Ix Mutal Ahaw for the de Young Museum in San Francisco, we used non-contact photometric stereo capture, a technique we developed with James Patterson at the Oxford University Robotics Department. This technique involves acquisition of multiple photographs under varying light & camera placement, as detailed in our paper here….

Replicating Carved Poetry at Angel Island

“The poems at Angel Island are among the most dramatic finds in American literature” – Karen L. Polster, University of California, Riverside. Between 1910 and 1940, as many as 175,000 Chinese immigrants were detained and processed at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco, California.  While interred under harsh conditions, many people carved poems into…