Ancient wonders captured in 3D Ben Kacyra

I’d like to start with a short story

it’s about a little boy whose father was

a history buff and who used to take him

by the hand to visit the ruins of a

ancient metropolis on the outskirts of

their town they would always stop by to

visit these huge winged Bulls that used

to guard the gates of that ancient

metropolis and the boy used to be scared

of these winged Bulls but the same time

they excited them and the dad used to

use those bulls to tell the boys stories

about that civilization and their work

let’s fast-forward to the San Francisco

Bay Area many decades later where I

started a technology company that

brought the world its first 3d laser

scanning system let me show you how it

works

long-range laser scanning works by

sending out a pulsed laser beam of light

the system measures the beings time of

light recording the time it takes for

the lights of you to surface

and make its return with two mirrors the

scanner calculates the beams horizontal

and vertical angles giving accurate XY

and z coordinates the point is then

recorded into a 3d visualization program

all of this happens in seconds you could

see here these systems are extremely

fast they collect millions of points at

a time with very high accuracy and very

high resolution a surveyor with

traditional survey tools would be

hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points

in a whole day these babies would be

producing something like 10,000 points a

second so as you can imagine this was a

paradigm shift in the survey and

construction as well as in reality

capture industry approximately 10 years

ago my wife and I started a foundation

to do good and right about that time the

Magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas 180 foot

tall in Afghanistan were blown up by the

Taliban they were gone in an instant and

unfortunately there was no detailed

documentation of these Buddhas this

clearly devastated me and I couldn’t

help but wonder about the fate of my old

friends the winged Bulls and the fate of

the many many heritage sites all over

the world both my wife and I was so

touched by this that we decided to

expand the mission of our foundation to

include digital heritage preservation of

world sites we called the project CyArk

which stands for cyber archive to date

with the help of a global network of

partners we’ve completed close to 50

projects let me show you some of them

Chichen Itza Rapa Nui

and what you’re seeing here are the

cloud of points Babylon Rosslyn Chapel

Pompeii and our latest project Mont

Rushmore which happened to be one of our

most challenging projects as you see

here we had to develop a special rig to

bring the scanner up close and personal

the results of our work in the field are

used to produce media and deliverables

to be used by conservators and

researchers we also produce media for

dissemination to the public free through

the CyArk website these would be used

for education cultural tourism etc what

you’re looking at in here is a 3d viewer

that we developed that would allow the

display and manipulation of cloud of

points in real time cutting sections

through them and extracting dimensions

this happens to be the cloud of points

for Tikal in here you see a traditional

2d architectural engineering drawing

that’s used for preservation and of

course we tell the stories through fly

throughs in here this is a fly through

the cloud of points of Tikal and here

you see it rendered and photo textured

with photography that we take of the

site and so this is not a video this is

actual 3d points with two to three

millimeter accuracy and of course the

data can be used to develop 3d models

that are very accurate and very detailed

in here you’re looking at a model that’s

extracted from the cloud of points for

Stirling Castle it’s used for studies

for visualization as well as for

education and finally we produce mobile

apps that include narrated virtual tools

the more I got involved in the heritage

field the more it became clear to me

that we’re losing the sights

and the stories faster than we can

physically preserve them of course

earthquakes and all the natural

phenomena floods tornados etc take their

toll however what occurred to me was

human caused destruction which was not

only causing a significant portion of

the destruction but actually it was

accelerating this includes arson urban

sprawl acid rain not to mention

terrorism and Wars it was getting more

and more apparent that were fighting a

losing battle we’re losing our sites and

the stories and basically we’re losing a

piece and a significant piece of our

collective memory imagine us as a human

race not knowing where we came from

luckily the last two or three decades

digital technologies have been

developing that have helped us to

develop tools that we brought to bear in

the digital preservation in our digital

preservation work this includes for

example the 3d laser scanning systems

ever more powerful personal computers 3d

graphics high-definition digital

photography not to mention the Internet

because of this accelerated pace of

destruction it became clear to us that

we needed to challenge ourselves and our

partners to accelerate our work and we

created a project we call the sigh out

500 challenge and that is to digitally

preserve 500 world heritage sites in

five years we do have the technology

that’s scalable and our network of

global partners has been expanding and

can be expanded expanded at a rapid rate

so we’re comfortable that this task can

be accomplished

however to me the 500 is really just the

first 500 in order to sustain our work

into the future we use technology

centers where we partner with local

universities and colleges to take the

technology to them whereby they then can

help us with digital preservation of

their Heritage Sites and at the same

time it gives them the technology to

benefit from in the future let me close

with another short story two years ago

we were approached by a partner of ours

to digitally preserve an important

heritage site and UNESCO heritage site

in Uganda the Royal kazoo be tombs the

work was done successfully in the field

and the data was archived and publicly

disseminated through the SIOP website

last March we received very sad news the

royal tombs had been destroyed by

suspected arson a few days later we

receive a call is the data available and

can it be used for reconstruction our

answer of course was yes let me leave

you with a final thought our heritage is

much more than our collective memory

it’s our collective treasure we owe it

to our children our grandchildren and

the generations we will never meet to

keep it safe and to pass it along thank

you

thank you

well I’m staying here because we wanted

to demonstrate to you the power of this

technology and so while I’ve been

speaking you have been scanned the two

wizards that I have that are behind the

curtain will help me bring the results

on the on the screen

this is all in 3d and of course you can

fly through the cloud of points you can

look at it from on top from the ceiling

you can look from different vantage

points but I’m going to ask Doug to zoom

in on an individual in the crowd just to

show the amount of detail that we can

create so you have been digitally

preserved in about four minutes I’d like

to thank the wizards here we were very

lucky to have two of our partners

participate in this the historic

Scotland and the Glasgow School of Art

I’d like to also thank personally the

efforts of David Mitchell who is the

director of conservation at historic

Auckland David and and Doug Pritchard

who is the head of visualization at the

Glasgow School of Art let’s give them a

hand

thank you