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Comment by jaspervdj | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic, a big part of seeing a painting in real life is seeing the structure and layers of brush strokes. It's a long shot but does anyone know if any work has been done to create depth maps of paintings and possibly combine them with scans?

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Yes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvEZME5ewqA

From memory it's gigapixel streaming textures with a normal map from dense photogrammetry data

Here's a cool paper on doing so:

https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/...

They even 3D printed it!

That information can be captured and reproduced with holograms. Among others, OptoClone holograms have been made that were entirely realistic (viewers thought they were the real object):

https://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/print/volume-52/iss...

https://verusart.com. 3D printed. $1,400.— buys you a copy of a van Gogh (https://shop.verusart.com/collections/verus-art-national-gal...)

That would be a cool use case for VR headsets.

It would also be The End for physical museums. If the appearance of the painting (the "frontal" lightfield under optimal illumination) has been recorded and securely stored... the physical substance of the painting becomes something that is only maintained for sentimental reasons. It's a basic premise of science and engineering that, if you have the recipe, you don't need the artifact. See Walter Benjamin etc on the idea that the original has an "aura" that can't be cloned. Of course it is nonsense, but it foresees the condition of mind-scanning and conversion into digital selves. There's no way any one of us currently alive will exist, consciously, in an electronic system. There's no way to transfer consciousness from the biological to the electronic substrate, though one can dream (as Greg Egan has) of shifting a conscious brain from one system to another.

In brief, human consciousness and artistic judgement isn't going away, for a couple of centuries at least.

> There's no way to transfer consciousness from the biological to the electronic substrate

Transferring? You are thinking small. What about expanding beyond your brain, so that it becomes a small part of a whole and by the time it starts failing it's just a peripheral input preprocessing device/local motion planner/unreliable redundant memory storage/small vote in global decision making and not you.

The possibility is still pretty far. Reliable biocompatible high throughput brain computer interfaces aren't there yet.

How about slowly replacing brain cells with synthetic ones while maintaining the consciousness in place?

Technical difficulties will be much greater. The brain is still a single point of failure. The "expansion" approach allows gradual increase of intelligence thru intermediate exocortex stage, boosting the progress, while studying which information processes/something else corresponds to conscious subjective experiences, paving the way for relocation of consciousness locus outside of the brain or resorting to other measures in a case of impossibility.

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