Ancient wonders captured in 3D - Ben Kacyra

[Music] [Applause] I'd like to start with a, uh, short story. Um, it's about a little boy, uh, whose father was, um, 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 Wing bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis. The boy used to be scared of these Wing Bulls, but at the same time they excited him. The dad used to use those Bulls to tell the boy stories about that Civilization and their work.

Uh, 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 beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return. With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate X, Y, 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 Bamyan 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 Wing Bulls, and the fate of the many, many Heritage sites all over the world. Both my wife and I were 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 CCH, 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, Roslin Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mount 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, uh, free through the SARCH website. Uh, 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 Tal. In here, you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that's used for preservation. And of course, we tell the stories through flythroughs. In here, this is a flythrough of the cloud points of Tal, and here you see it rendered and phototextured with photography that we take of the site. So, this is not a video; this is actual 3D points with 2 to 3 mm accuracy.

And of course, the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed. And here you're looking at a model that's extracted from the cloud of points for Sing Castle. It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education, and finally, we produced mobile apps that include narrated virtual tours. The more I got involved in the heritage field, the more it became clear to me that we're losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them.

Of course, earthquakes and all the natural phenomena, floods, tornadoes, 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 accelerating it. This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars. It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle. We're losing our sites and the stories, and basically, we're losing 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 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 SARCH 500 Challenge.

That is to digitally preserve 500 world heritage sites in 5 years. We do have the technology that's scalable, and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate, so we're comfortable that this task can be accomplished. However, to me, uh, 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 the 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, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal CBI tombs. The work was done successfully in the field, and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the C website. Last March, we received very sad news: the Royal tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson. A few days later, we received a call asking if the data was available and could 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, thank you.

Well, I'm staying here because, uh, we wanted to demonstrate to you the power of this technology. And so, while I've been speaking, you have been [Laughter] scanned. The two wizards that I have that are behind the curtain uh will help me bring the results 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. Uh, 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, uh, you have been digitally preserved in about 4 minutes. I'd like to, uh, thank the wizard here. Uh, we were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this: the, uh, Historic Scotland and the Glasgow School of Art. Um, I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of, um, David Mitchell, who is the director of conservation at Historic Scotland, David, and Doug Pritchard, who is the head of visualization at the Glasgow School of Art. Let's give them a hand. Thank you.