If you had a time machine, where would you go? If I had one I would set it to go back to 3:00am every morning so that I could get a couple extra hours of sleep every night. I know that’s not what you were expecting me to say. You thought I was going to say something like I want to go back to days of the Vikings and watch them do battle. Yeah, right. Like I am just going to sit there in a lawn chair and a bag of chips at watch a battle happen around me. Chances are I would be dead in two minutes from lack of battle skills. Or maybe I would like to go back to when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. All of the sudden I would pop up on the ship. Can you imagine the difficulty explaining where I came from? The truth is that we don’t really need to consider that question because there is no such time machine. It would be better just to enjoy the relics and artifact that we have today to experience the past. One technology that is helping us do that is 3D laser scanning services.
Annelies Van de Ven from Melbourne University is one expert who is working on preserving some of those artifacts that we have to learn about the past. There are lots of artifacts like clay tablets that are brittle and cannot be handled except with the greatest care. With a little mishandling they could crumble to pieces. It is important to find ways to protect and preserve these things so that we don’t lose them. 3D laser scanning services is one way that this can be done. Annellies took to the task of making digital copies of these tablets.
Making a digital copy of a brittle cuneiform tablet using 3D laser scanning services has several advantages. First of all, it is a method that requires no contact of the artifact. No touching means less chance that the item will be damaged. Another advantage is that it creates an exact digital copy of the item. It is so much more effective than doing hand drawings or even taking photos. Even better is that once there is a digital copy, then it can be passed around and shared by a larger audience of people. Better access to the item means that more research can be done on it. That makes for a better understanding of history.
The time machine idea sounds really cool, but the chances of such thing happening is slim to none. We had best let the idea remain in the movies. 3D scanning services on the other hand, has a real means to help us look at history and study it. More efforts should be taken like this researcher did to digitize these relics of history. In fact, there are. This is only one example of 3D laser scanning services being used in this way. There are museums all over with the same plan in mind to preserve artifacts.