Local Photoreal Fridge Viewer

This project implements a fully local pipeline for building a rotatable 3D browser view of a dilution refrigerator on macOS:

phone photos -> COLMAP reconstruction -> Three.js viewer

Project layout

• photos/raw/: source images from the lab capture session
• recon/colmap/: COLMAP database and sparse/dense outputs
• scripts/: reproducible reconstruction and publishing helpers
• viewer/: local Three.js app that loads viewer/public/models/fridge.ply

Quick start

1. Install COLMAP on macOS:

   brew install colmap

2. Install the viewer dependencies:

   cd viewer
   npm install

3. Start the local viewer:

   cd viewer
   npm run dev

4. Replace the placeholder model once you have a reconstruction:

   ./scripts/publish_model.sh

Capture guide

• Shoot 180-300 still photos.
• Use a fixed lens mode and avoid portrait mode, night mode, HDR mode changes, and digital zoom.
• Capture three vertical bands around the fridge: low, mid, and high.
• Keep at least 70% overlap between neighboring images.
• Move in small angular steps and keep exposure stable.
• Include surrounding scene texture so camera registration has stable reference features.
• Avoid people crossing the scene while capturing.
• If registration is weak, add temporary markers in the surroundings, not on sensitive hardware.

Reconstruction workflow

1. Copy phone images into photos/raw/.

2. Run:

   ./scripts/run_colmap.sh

   Or run against a specific image folder and keep the output in a named subdirectory:

   ./scripts/run_colmap.sh "photos/raw/tape_measure/Tape measure photos " tape_measure

3. If the run succeeds, publish the dense point cloud into the viewer:

   ./scripts/publish_model.sh

   Or publish a named run to a different viewer asset:

   ./scripts/publish_model.sh tape_measure tape_measure.ply

4. Refresh the browser viewer.

If your local COLMAP build does not support CUDA dense stereo, the script falls back to exporting a sparse point cloud at recon/colmap/<run>/sparse/sparse.ply, and publish_model.sh will use that automatically.

Notes

• v1 is for visual inspection, not precision measurement.
• The viewer is configured through viewer/src/config.ts.
• You can replace viewer/public/models/fridge.ply with a later reconstruction without changing code.
• Set viewer/src/config.ts source to schematic for the hand-built labeled dilution refrigerator scene, or back to ply to view a reconstructed model file.