3D Model of Carleton’s Pool
Introduction
For students on the Carleton swim team, a significant portion of time at Carleton is spent within the walls of West Gym, specifically Thorpe Pool. As a result, whether immediately recognized or not, the pool holds lots of significance to the athletes, as well as many stories and traditions that the team engages in. Since there has been talk about a new pool being needed in the near future, this project aims to document the space itself, as well as some important objects, traditions, and stories the pool holds. To do this, we used photogrammetry to create a 3D model of the pool using Metaspace, and annotated the 3D model with important story points of the swim team.
Sources
Given this was largely a photogrammetry project, most of our data collection was our own photos. However, we began our project using The Builder and West Gym maps to gain a better understanding of the space we were working with. We took the photos ourselves, and then used the software Metashape to create the 3D model. In order to host the 3D model somewhere that could be embedded onto a website, we used Sketchfab, and our website is written on WordPress to allow for 3D embeddings. Additionally, while story points were largely written ourselves, we consulted with Andy Clark, the head coach of the swim team, for additional stories to include.
Processes
The first process was taking the photos of the pool. Following general practice of good photogrammetry, we took these pictures by standing along the edge of a wall, and taking pictures of the far side of the pool, up and down to capture the entirety of the ceiling and pool. We then would take a few steps over, and take another grouping of pictures as such. We did this along the entire pool, then took more pictures of areas that needed better capturing, such as more angles of the diving board, pictures from up in the stands, of the floor, and of the blocks. This gave us multiple pictures of all angles of the pool for the software to be able to align photos together.
Once we had our complete set of photos, we converted them into jpg from heic photos, and uploaded them into Metashape. Given that we took around 1800 pictures, aligning the pictures took a lofty amount of time, but after around a day or so, this finished and we were able to move on to creating the point cloud, the mesh, and texturizing the 3D model. We also manually removed floating artifacts that were remnants of photos not properly aligning, so removing these cleaned up the model slightly.
We then had to decimate the model in order for the model to be hosted on Sketchfab, as we initially exceeded the website’s site limit of 50MB. Once uploaded to Sketchfab, we were able to annotate features of the 3D model in which we could incorporate our story points. As touched on previously, we wrote the story parts mainly from our memory of significant areas of the pool, but we also consulted Andy Clark after taking the pictures.
Presentation
Once the model was fully created and annotated, we embedded the 3D model into our website. We chose to host the model on Sketchfab due to its ability to be embedded onto other websites, as well as its annotations giving as close of a tour alternative as possible (see the Challenges page for why this was an alternative). Sketchfab has a limit of 20 annotations, so we had to choose the 20 areas of the pool that would benefit most from an annotation. The basis for choosing these 20 were areas that were spread out enough to cover most of the pool area, places that didn’t model well where a picture could be helpful, and places with the best stories were from. Since we have more than 20 story points we wanted to cover, the additional story points can be seen on the bottom of the home page. For the story points within Sketchfab, we included text describing the story point, and included an image or two to increase clarity of what the location actually looks like. The user can either navigate the model and click on each story point, or they can choose the “Start Autopilot” option to automatically traverse all annotations. We hope that the interactivity of the embedded model allows the user to fully explore the space while also learning about the stories within it.
Bibliography
Hoekstra, J. (n.d.). The Builder. Voice. Retrieved February 23, 2023, from https://apps.carleton.edu/voice/?story_id=1244717&issue_id=1198761
Map, C. (n.d.). Campus Map – Carleton College. Carleton. Retrieved February 23, 2023, from https://www.carleton.edu/map/.
