Last week the Smithsonian launched a new collection of nearly three million digital artifacts that you can download and reuse for free. I published a video about how to access and search through that new collection. For the sake of brevity I didn’t include everything that you can do with the artifacts in the Smithsonian’s digital collections. One of the things that I didn’t include in that video was how to use the 3D objects collection.

In the Smithsonian’s 3D Digitization collection students can find hundreds of 3D scans of physical objects. Students can view and move the objects. Within the viewing tools there is a measuring tool students can use to get a better sense of the true size of an objects. They can also download the 3D images to use in projects of their own. In the following video I demonstrate how students can measure, share, and download objects in the Smithsonian’s 3D Digitization collection.