Editing Final Report 2012 (section)

===Future Development===
Although the likelihood of actually solving the case during the course of an honours project is quite low, this exercise provides myriad ways in which electrical and electronic students can expand upon the work done by previous years' groups.

It would be possible for a group in future years to carry on the work that we have done on the 3-D model, finding a way to manipulate it to produce a passable likeness of the Somerton Man as he might have appeared before he died, with hair colour, eye colour and skin colour all included. Perhaps they could develop a device and software that allows them to automatically scan and rotate an object and fuse the scans together to create the 3-D model. There is also the option to integrate the re-designed GUI interface into the existing code, or come up with an even more user-friendly design themselves and use that instead. No doubt they could find yet more ciphers that could be tested and incorporated into the CipherGUI - one such that we considered was the Baconian which is trivially discounted but would be a useful addition to the CipherGUI. If they were so inclined, they might want to apply the techniques and programs developed to similar mysterious deaths, such as the previously mentioned Joseph Saul Marshall case in Sydney.

Alternatively, they could try some totally new avenues of investigation. The body of the Somerton Man is known to be buried in the cemetery on West Terrace, and so if it were exhumed it would provide DNA that could be analysed in order to identify where he was likely to come from, and perhaps compared with that of potential candidates in order to eliminate them (or not). As a project in itself, future groups could look into more efficient searching through the internet, either through parallel processing - and overcoming the pitfalls inherent in that approach - or by accessing pre-indexed data somehow. Different ways to try to identify the Somerton Man could be considered and investigated, such as the use of image comparison software to look at photos of potential "Somerton Men" and discount them based on facial recognition or something similar.

The possibilities thrown up by this case are limited only by the imaginativeness of the students and the supervisor, covering as it does such a wide variety of aspects. Even 60 years on, so little is known for sure that any insights could prove to be decisive - what more could a budding engineer want than to solve one of the most fascinating cold cases in Australian history?