Kinect Scans of T. Rex Skull Shed Light on Mysterious Holes

To complete a 360-degree scan of a T. rex skull, a researcher mounted a Kinect on a

body-supported rig and walked around the fossil. Credit: MIT Media Lab When a group of forensic dentistry experts set out in 2016 to investigate what may have caused some peculiar holes in a T. rex jaw, they decided to perform a 3D scan of the skull so they could examine the perforations more closely. But they ran into a big problem — the fossil skull was too massive to fit into existing 3D scanners. However, the Camera Culture research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab partnered with them to deliver those scans. They did it with a consumer product designed for gesture recognition in gaming — the Microsoft Kinect — and used open-source software to capture and process the data, quickly creating 3D digital models of the T. rexfossil, a process the researchers described in a new study. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created By 3D Printing]