Scientists in the computer science department at the University of Kentucky have developed a new method known as virtual unwrapping which uses a sophisticated X-ray machine to scan the scrolls without damaging them The virtual unwrapping that we innovated basically allows a 300 and 60 degree set of views to be collected from an object that rotates in front of an x-ray beam This is a real scroll that's 2000 years old and in cross-section We can see there's damage there are parts that are missing sections that are broken Now we're using our software for the second step which is to trace these wraps all the way through so that we can build a three-D model that lets us flatten that out and then read the text that's on it And once we're done we've achieved this image that's on the left which is the final completely unwrapped version
