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