 Today, we're taking a 3D scan of the mansion of the Cooper Hewitt Museum. The first step was to scan the interior of the museum. We scanned every stairwell, every room on the inside. We then moved to the outside to scan the exterior walls. We linked those together, and now today, scanning the rooftop so that we can join the roof to the exterior, to the interior, to create a single model. The way we do that is we take millions of measurements by using a LiDAR scanner. This casts a laser off of a spinning mirror. When it hits the object, it bounces back, measures the distance, and then we can import this data into the computer. From that, we look at it as a point cloud, just millions of dots. We then create a mesh in the computer, which is sort of like a wireframe. And then we take hundreds of pictures, we map those pictures onto the mesh, and now we have a textured model that we can look at from any direction, and it looks just like the real thing. There are so many cool things you can do with a 3D model like this. You can take a virtual tour in your computer. You can examine all the historic architectural details. You can create 3D prints using a 3D printer. You can use it to make a video game and have zombies and aliens running through the halls of the Cooper Hewitt. An exhibition designer who's planning a show at the Cooper Hewitt might want to actually plan their exhibit. There's so much you can do with a 3D model like this, and it's so awesome that it's free for download.