Access 3D Lab

10/02/2025

Be a part of history today! Register for our LiDAR for Digital Mapping Workshop, where you’ll
gain real-world experience in preservation and analysis in the Tampa Bay area!
✨ November 15-16
✨ Open to undergraduates, graduate students, and anyone interested!
✨ Professional guidance, Real-world experience, and a Certificate for resumes
✨ Reserve your spot today- click the link to apply!
https://www.usf.edu/arts-sciences/labs/access3d/research-and-teaching/workshops.aspx

09/16/2025

Be a part of history today! Register for our LiDAR for Digital Mapping Workshop where you’ll gain real-world experience in preservation and analysis in the Tampa Bay area!
November 15-16
✨ Open to undergraduates, graduate students, and to anyone interested!
✨ Reserve your spot today- click the link to apply!

https://www.usf.edu/arts-sciences/labs/access3d/research-and-teaching/workshops.aspx

Professional guidance | Real-world experience | Certificate for resumes

02/19/2025

At Access 3D Lab, we love to check in with our former students! In 2021, Noah Myers participated in our May Geomatics for Heritage, Tourism, and Sustainability workshop. He later incorporated what he learned in the workshop to land a job with FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency. In his own words, Noah says: “Thanks to the experience with GIS products, I gained through the USF climate change geomatics and cultural heritage workshop, I have been able to greatly contribute to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s outreach strategy. I was tasked with designing routes for our team’s community visits in response to flooding in Detroit, Michigan. The experience I gained at the lab allowed me to effectively plan the routes, which boosted our ability to connect with the people of Detroit in a time of need. This, in turn, maximized FEMA’s presence in the community, which served to engender goodwill, and as a result we were able to get thousands to apply for disaster assistance. The tool I designed has already been implemented in regional operating procedures and is expected to roll out nationally sometime soon.”

Stories like Noah’s underline Access 3D Lab’s commitment to incorporating cutting-edge visualization and virtualization technologies into training programs geared at solving real-world problems. And we love it when our students can incorporate this experience into their professional careers. Great job, Noah!

12/09/2024

PAID Spring 2025 internship opportunity is available with the Galileo Group.

Interns will gain valuable hands-on experience with GIS and commercial remote sensing.

12/05/2024

PAID Spring 2025 Internship opportunity available with the Ocean Circulation Lab, Center for Ocean Mapping and Innovative Technologies, and the Glider Operations Group.

Interns will gain valuable hands-on experience with oceanographic research, technological innovation, fieldwork and data collection, and scientific communication.

11/21/2024

Davide Tanasi is a key collaborator with the Access 3D Lab and we are excited to share his most recent findings on the use of hallucinogenic drinks in ancient Egyptian rituals.

Well done Davide!

Through advanced chemical analyses on an Egyptian vase at the Tampa Museum of Art, Davide Tanasi confirmed the vase last held a cocktail of psychedelic drugs, likely for a magical ritual.

10/17/2024

Access 3D Lab is unique because it is an instrumentation hub for the University of South Florida campus and community – meaning that we go beyond surveying and mapping with lidar: we also have a whole range of close-range metrology instruments like the FARO Technologies ScanArm, Artec 3D structured light scanners, and photogrammetry and 360 imaging equipment. With our latest investments in mobile and aerial lidar, we can now digitize anything from the size of a pea through an entire landscape, coastline, or urban district. Check out Dr. Harrison's interview with Lidar News - Laser Focused on the Lidar Industry to learn more!

USF School of Public Affairs
USF College of Arts and Sciences

USF and Phoenix Lidar: Building the Future of LiDAR Education and Smart City Planning .. My professional background might be a bit different

08/19/2024

At the Access 3D Lab we are happy to share our resources with the research community at USF. Recently, Dr. Kenneth Whaley of the Economics Department employed our computing power to analyze spatial characteristics of US neighborhoods. His project, in collaboration with Dr. Vikram Maheshri at the University of Houston, will be presented at the Urban Economics Association meetings this fall.

Imagine households living close to one another but separated by an invisible administrative boundary such as a school zone. We would expect kids from the two families to attend different schools, but how do their neighborhoods differ along other dimensions, and why? What if households zoned to the same school live on opposite sides of a physical boundary like railroad tracks or highways?

Dr. Whaley has mapped nearly 60,000 census block groups to various boundaries, analyzing 1,700+ variables describing block group characteristics. The study results show a large percentage of neighborhood features are statistically different at school zones (93%) and railroad tracks (87%), with a smaller percentage for highways (64%) and county lines (28%). Once published, this research will push and to consider the widespread effects of boundaries on the urban landscape.

07/18/2024

Last week, we welcomed a local surveying company, SurvTech Solutions, to do a guest lecture and demo for our Mobile Lidar Field Methods students! We love collaborating with our local business community to help students make connections between what they’re learning in class and potential career paths utilizing geospatial technologies. It was great to hear about SurvTech's lidar capabilities and learn about some interesting field projects they have done with their extensive range of terrestrial, mobile, and aerial lidar instruments – and hear about some projects they’re most proud of and some challenges they’ve faced along the way. Thanks so much to David O’Brien, President and co-founder; Mark Bickel, the Drone Department Manager; and Bryce Gerhart, the LiDAR and photogrammetry tech for making the presentation and demo a success!

07/16/2024

We’re excited to share a summer fieldwork update from three of our CAS-Visualization, Virtualization, and Simulation fellowship recipients!

The Access 3D Lab provided instrumentation, laptops, and 3D processing software to facilitate innovative research on human skeletal analysis at the renowned University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) donated skeletal collection. The UTK Donated Collection is Housed in the Department of Anthropology at UTK and is stored in a well-protected environment that is continually monitored. All skeletal remains are curated and maintained by the FAC within the Department of Anthropology. Because all individuals have a known age, it’s a great opportunity to test how new, digital methods of age estimation programs such as CoxAge3D perform compared to traditional methods of age estimation. Eva Pesta and her colleagues, Myriam Rodriguez, and Courtney Morgan spent a week 3D scanning the UTK collection with the Artec Space Spider, documenting 70 isolated pelvic bones and processing them in Artec Studio. The team hopes to fill a gap in knowledge related to the validation of new, automated methods of age-estimation, while also collecting data for Eva Pesta’s honor’s thesis.

We are grateful to the Forensic Anthropology Center at UTK for the opportunity and research learning experiences that came with this project! And of course, thanks to Dr. Jonathan Bethard (Anthropology) for advising and guidance on the research question. It’s great to see three of our CAS-VVS students build upon their experience and grow their research expertise!

06/26/2024

Dr. Harrison is getting back to her roots as an archaeologist and assisting with excavations with the USF Institute for Digital Exploration in Malta!

06/13/2024

About seven months ago, we brought our Metis Gamma 3DS planetary desktop scanner down to the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Museum on the Big Cypress Reservation for an Institute for Museum and Library Studies (IMLS) grant-funded project. Since then, research assistant Joseph Gilbert has been working diligently to digitize a collection of historic newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries. There are 613 objects in the collection, 609 of which have been scanned and 318 of which have been fully processed including OCR conversion. The Newspapers represent a valuable resource for the Seminole community to research and tell the story of the Seminole War.

This project is part of a broader initiative to research and digitally catalog the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum’s collection of historic newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries. An earlier IMLS grant allowed the museum to improve catalog records and create a finding aid. The current effort to scan and generate high-resolution, searchable images for hundreds of newspapers will make this content available to native and worldwide research communities as a robust digital archive. The University of South Florida Access 3D Lab provided technical training and access to the equipment necessary to complete the project. We are proud to be a part of this important initiative and will provide updates on the searchable archive as it becomes available!

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Service award number MN-251930-OMS-22 (https://imls.gov/grants/awarded/mn-251930-oms-22).