What’s That on Campus Over There? Oh, Just a Giant Head – Bowdoin News

Before he taught his spring semester classOceania: Indigenous Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism,Assistant Professor of Anthropology Willi Lempert wanted to find a way to convey to his students the enormity of the giant heads of Easter Island.

The sculpturesknown asMoaiby the Rapa Nui people who carved the figures from volcanic rock between1100 and 1680 CEare massive. The biggest one is more than thirty feet high. But it's hard to assess their impressive scale without actually visiting the island in person.

When Thais Carrillo 23 and Cobra Curtis 23 heard about Lempert's dilemma,they volunteered for the challenge. Both have experience working with virtual reality (VR): Carrillo has made a VR version of the Giant's Stairs on Bailey Island, and Curtis has been helping build a VR version of the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island.

(This project, to be precise, uses augmented reality, which is when digital information is superimposed on the real world through a viewfinder of some kind.)

The two students first selected one among the many sculptures on the island to work witha manageable thirteen-foot-high head. That's also the average size of the figuresof which there are nearly 900 located around the island. Basing it on an existing Moai head model, they rendered the digital head in 3D with a software program called Blender.

After they were satisfied with their life-like depiction, they deployed remote-sensing technologyor LiDAR, which is activated in newer phones and iPadsto enable users of their tool to bring up the head on their device (an iPhone or iPad) and place it anywhere they like.

So students can call up and anchor the towering head in their dorm room, in Thorne Dining Hall, outside on the Quadany space they can quickly scan with their gadget's camera. Then they can compare the head with objects and landmarks they know firsthand.

(Additionally, the tool allows users to minimize the head, so if you would like to pretend you had a paperweight Easter Island head for your desk, you can make it very small.)

"Through this augmented reality program, students were able to place Moai from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) into the world around them. Using their LiDAR-equipped iPads, they were able to walk around and approach these iconic statues to get a sense of their scale and the incredible amount of ingenuity that it took to create them." Professor Willi Lempert

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What's That on Campus Over There? Oh, Just a Giant Head - Bowdoin News