A global team of computer scientists and engineers have developed an innovative technique that more completely reconstructs challenging 3D objects. An ancient scientific breakthrough serves as the foundation for the team’s modern, innovative solution to remaining challenges in current 3D shape reconstruction. This new approach to 3D shape acquisition is based on the well-known fluid displacement discovery by Archimedes and turns modeling surface reconstruction into a volumetric problem. Most notably, their method accurately reconstructs even hidden parts of an object that typical 3D laser scanners are not able to capture.