Before the Kinect hit the mass market and introduced the world to the wonder of depth mapping, there was the Rutt-Etra video synth amazing us with sparse, minimal analog video raster manipulation 39 years before a Microsoft even existed(way back in 1972).  Ok, so its not the same thing exactly, but the idea of a 3d, topographical landscape extrapolated from a 2d plane inspired many, including Joy Division who used it as the cover of their debut album, Unknown Pleasures.

Anyway, nerdy historical tangents aside, topographic maps whether analog or digital have always been a fascination of mine.  I’m eager to fabricate a wooden version of a topographic map that functions as a laptop stand.  The different elevations of the wooden peaks serve nicely as gradients for the laptop to rest upon.

This is enthusiasm is compounded by the fact that our initial tests of using wheatgrass and moss as living pixels were inconclusive.  We were unable to control the growth/decay rate of either type of plant pixel with light intensity (we tested for color spectrum, light gradations 0-255) by submitting the plants to a high intensity projector for a week. Sooo….

For the data representation final, I think we’re going to switch to gears and from living pixels (which will have to wait till summertime) and represent data as a topography.

RhinoResurf for Rhino is a reverse engineering plug-in for Rhinoceros® 4.0 and 5.0. This plug-in gives Rhino the ability to reconstruct the geometry represented by NURB surface of an object from a mesh or point cloud which describes it.

Finally, Blender has its own tools for dealing with mesh reconstruction. Taylor Goodman, who developed a structured light scanner for Makerbot, has a tutorial describing how to reconstruct a mesh for 3d printing from a point cloud:

The 3d Sensing and Visualization class from Spring 2010 at ITP taught by oF superstars Kyle McDonald and Zach Lieberman is a great resource on Reconstructing a Mesh from a Point Cloud.  Links below:

3D Sensing and Visualization ITP blog

MeshLab

ReSurf

BlenderArtists.org

And if all else fails for data representation, I could just do this: