3-D Education: Biological Anthropology Explored Virtually

Technology is an everyday presence in the lives of people everywhere and the field of anthropology is no different. With all of the current and future advances in this area a new 3-D way to conduct biological anthropology has emerged. Using inexpensive software, a web-cam and some manual labor, human cranial remains can be recreated and manipulated on the screen. My senior project is focused on how such technology could be used in a classroom setting, specifically college level biological anthropology labs, but the same technology could be used in high schools and museums as well. Students participating in the lab would be able to scan cranial remains into the program, manipulate the image, even fuse images to one another and work with various measurements in order to determine such factors as sex and general population of the individual. The measurements taken would allow for the use of key methodologies while reinforcing the importance of major landmarks on the crania. Implementing this research would allow biological anthropology students to explore a new area of the field while continuing to learn the basics.