"3D microscopy" event in partnership with Looking Glass and MakerBay

DIY 3D microscopy is a new way of taking stunning 3D images of microscopic scenes using conventional microscopes or a simple $1 modification to your smartphone. It's a very simple technique that you can do in a few minutes in almost any setting and get really cool results. The process is based on a standard photography technique called Focus Stacking, where you take multiple images of the same scene with different focus settings, and then use software to find the in-focus parts of each image and combine them together. Anytime you see a photo of a fancy watch on a billboard in Causeway Bay, you're looking at a photograph taken this way. Over the past several weeks, I've developed a refinement that lets us recover a 3D model from the images that can be 3D printed, shared on facebook, or viewed in a volumetric display.

During this meetup, we will modify a conventional microscope to use a smartphone camera to record images, and we'll also supply materials for anyone to turn their smartphone into a high-powered pocket microscope. Then, we'll take samples of macro and microscopic life around Maker Bay and capture 3D images that we can share, print and enjoy.