Bear Bones Lab URAP Project 3: Recovering Missing American Airmen Project
Jun Sunseri, Professor
Anthropology
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
The Archaeological Research Facility is teaming with us to develop detailed photorealistic 3D models of WW2 aircraft that went down in remote areas. The project team has begun detailed photo documentation of vintage aircraft in museums and private collections to understand what airframe components (hard points and high-density parts) field recovery teams are likely to encounter during survey operations, to best correlate air crew operating positions to recovered remains for repatriation to their families. Creating a workflow to share with allied volunteer groups working at small air museums around the country would aid in populating our model inventory for sharing with recovery teams.
Role: We seek students with experience in Maya or 3DStudioMax (or the free open source Blender or Meshlab) to work with us. Those programs are Adobe or Autocad, and the free/open alternatives. Ideally, they have experience in the commercial software, but they could learn the opensource ones pretty quickly and develop some basic tutorials for associated volunteers. Meshlab is especially good for cleaning up photogrammetry models, filling holes, etc.
Qualifications: GIS, 3D computer modeling, photogrammetry, or allied software
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Nico Tripcevich
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Engineering, Design & Technologies Social Sciences