Relightable Dome creates interactive images where you control the light source

Stitching together a bunch of images to create a single picture is hardly a new concept. Panoramas are old hat, and Google is even using 360-degree photos to help guide your shopping decisions. But a team of students at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, with the help of a few others, are taking a slightly different approach. The Relightable Dome, or Relightable Photobooth, uses Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technology which captures an object or person under a variety of lighting conditions then combine it into a single, interactive photo. Inside the box
is a concave surface studded with 81 LED flashes. A custom microcontroller inside triggers each flash in sequence and a camera mounted at the rear captures an image at each stop. And, while the enclosure is custom, the camera doesn't need to be. At the back is simply a bracket that practically any shooter can be mounted on, though in this case it was a Canon DSLR. The pictures are then stitched together on a laptop using a piece of open source software and a special algorithm to create an interactive image where you control the light source. The whole process, from triggering the first flash to final file takes less than five minutes.

The project was partially inspired by Yang Jiang's background in photography, and her obsession with lighting and the way shadows can play with the perception of the human face. Along with Peiqi Su, Liu Jing and Liao Wei, she worked to create this project for ITP's Winter show, where it drew a lot of attention -- almost every time we walked by someone was crouched with their head inside. The next step is potential commercialization. Right now, the only way to view the files is either with a desktop RTI viewer, or through the web view on the Relightable website. Eventually the group plans to build an embedable widget for viewing the images, but for now you'll have to go to their site and upload images of your favorite Engadget editors directly.

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