Kapa‘a Japanese Stone Lantern (Ishidoro)

thingiverse

This is a beta version of Kauai Makerspace's (KMS) historical preservation initiative, using photogrammetry to render local, important objects into digital assets for preservation, sharing, and educational use. This first trial and subsequent interpolation to fix missing shell came out good enough to share. Purpose KMS is interested in digitally mapping historic sites and preserving that information as 3D models with and without skin information. These can then be shared freely with all interested parties and used for VR / AR / mixed reality applications, 3D Model printing, educational examples, etc. KMS hopes these files will become a Kauai, Hawaii resource and share them with the broader world bits of Hawaiiana. Background This is a photo capture > photogrammetry > 3D model of the Stone Lantern that sits in the Kapa'a Beach park on the Island of Kauai, Hawaii. It is an important historical monument of Japanese culture in Kauai, and also the anti-Japanese sentiment resulting from World War II. Briefly, local Japanese often owned small businesses on the island of Kauai. To celebrate their heritage, a Japanese Stone Lantern was erected in 1912 in Kapa'a, Hawaii. In 1943, the lantern was taken down and buried due to anti-Japanese sentiment. The lantern was forgotten until found in 1972. In 1987 it was unburied and re-erected, and after several community restoration projects, it stands as photo-captured for this project. Notes The lantern is ~20 feet tall and the photo-capture for this beta were done by hand at ground level. As such the photogrammetry interpolation becomes more crude towards the top of the model eventually resulting in holes. 375 photos were used, and the white balance of each photo was not normalized further resulting in shading errors. However, after using Meshmixer to fill the shell holes via interpolation, the resulting model has a great degree of fidelity. Community members who have viewed the digital model and the color 6" 3D print KMS created immediately recognize the Kapaa Lantern. KMS will redo this project with appropriate photo-capture positioning and color normalization, and post those results in the future. In the meantime, this model is a good start and hopefully useful to anyone who wants to use it. Please contact KMS at info@kauaimakerspace.org for commercial models to use. References Here are some very nice background stories about the Kapaa Stone Lantern at the following links: <a href="https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=9786">The Kapa‘a Japanese Stone Lantern (Ishidoro), Preserving the History of Kapa‘a’s Issei Generation</a> <a href="http://www.inspirationjournal.com/pdf/2007-5a.pdf#page=14&zoom=auto">Kauai’s Japanese Stone Lantern Project: The Healing of Historic Memories</a>