  The "digital Michelangelo project" was a seminal computer vision project in
the early 2000's that pushed the capabilities of acquisition systems and
involved multiple people from diverse fields, many of whom are now leaders in
industry and academia. Reviewing this project with modern eyes provides us with
the opportunity to reflect on several issues, relevant now as then to the field
of computer vision and research in general, that go beyond the technical
aspects of the work.
  This article was written in the context of a reading group competition at the
week-long International Computer Vision Summer School 2017 (ICVSS) on Sicily,
Italy. To deepen the participants understanding of computer vision and to
foster a sense of community, various reading groups were tasked to highlight
important lessons which may be learned from provided literature, going beyond
the contents of the paper. This report is the winning entry of this guided
discourse (Fig. 1). The authors closely examined the origins, fruits and most
importantly lessons about research in general which may be distilled from the
"digital Michelangelo project". Discussions leading to this report were held
within the group as well as with Hao Li, the group mentor.
