How would you have looked like 2000 years ago? Peel 3D can show you how!

Two thousand years ago, there was no social media, selfies, or Snapchats. And definitely no 3D scanning! The best (and only!) way to capture a person’s portrait was to carve it in stone. These stone carvings inevitably lasted centuries, offering us a window to the past and how people looked like in ancient Greece or Egypt.

Who do we look like? Do we have an ancient doppelganger? This is precisely what the Musée de la Civilisation tried to answer, coming up with the fascinating exhibit, “My 2000-year-old double.” The museum recruited around thirty people using a contest with specific facial characteristics. The faces of the selected lucky few were then cross-referenced with a large sculpture database provided by the Musée d'art et d'histoire de Genève  and the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art. The team used a face-matching algorithm to find the closest match between the subjects and statues.

You might ask how this connects to the Peel 3D affordable scanner. It turns out the Musée de la Civilisation also bought its own scanner to scan the faces of all candidates. The plan was to immortalize these faces—not in stone, but with modern techniques. Naturally, that meant 3D scanning and 3D printing! The museum needed something quick and easy to use; the project team members had many faces to scan and were planning to use the scanner on their own.