<p> The Zygo NewView 5000 is a new piece of equipment for McMaster University - it has recently been bought, and it is the first white light interferometer at McMaster. This thesis begins by developing the capabilities of this equipment. A significant limitation found is that the sample being measured must be near perpendicular to the optical axis. The optical axis is the centre of the light beam path for the light that the white light interferometer uses to make measurements. A significant enough angle away from perpendicularity will cause "dropout," where no data is returned for that pixel. Through experimenting with taking flat measurements (where the test part is perfectly perpendicular) and attempting to combine them with tilted measurements, a certain amount of distortion was found between the two. In order to properly fill in data, this problem needs to be addressed; correspondingly the focus of the thesis was altered to account for the distortion. Further experiments were performed comparing measurement profile results to those obtained using a Mitutoyo Formtracer, a stylus profilometer. It was determined that measurement distortion on the Zygo NewView only occurred when the samples were tilted; tilted measurements from the Zygo NewView were therefore altered with a distortion correction function to compensate for the error. There was a much better match of the tilted Zygo data to the Mitutoyo Formtracer results when the distortion correction was applied to the data, particularly in the areas where the tilt improves the data quality.</p> / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

pablo@espaciosdigitales.org / In this paper, the author explains why architects who know how to use scripts have an advantage over the ones who just know how to manipulate a specific software. The reason behind this affirmation is that knowing how to program frees the architect from the rules and language of the interactive software. To prove his point, the author organized two workshops where students at the school of architecture learned to use Rhinoscript. The students didn’t create a new interface, but used an existing one. They adapted the program (Rhino) to a design problem they had formulated at the beginning of the workshop. Students could have also used MaxScript (3DS Max) and MelScript (Maya).