Scots Aim Lasers at Landmarks
EDINBURGH — Come April a small team of experts from the Glasgow School of Art and the government heritage entity Historic Scotland will fly to South Dakota at the behest of an organization called CyArk and the United States National Park Service. They will make laser scans and computer models of Mount Rushmore.
Aside from the wee bit of Scottish blood in three of the four enshrined presidents (Lincoln’s the odd man out, in case you’re wondering), there is of course nothing whatsoever Scottish about this most all-American of sites. But cultural expertise transcends national borders. The Scottish team of four or five will spend a few days setting up and moving around their various scanners to capture all of Mount Rushmore’s nooks and crannies, collecting billions of bits of digital information, which will then be brought back here, to be crunched and sorted out by computer.
What results should be the most complete and precise three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of times more detailed and accuratethan the best photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction of a millimeter...
... The cultural implications of the technology are big, as are the political ones for Scotland, which, via the country’s culture minister, Michael Russell, has latched on to the laser team’s work.
It was about three years ago that Mr. Pritchard’s art school group began surveying a swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes. They caught the attention of Mr. Mitchell, who enlisted Mr. Pritchard to scan a decaying iron bridge in Dundee, which was nearly impossible to survey with much accuracy except by laser. The bridge project led to scans of Stirling Castle and Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th-century Gothic fancy to which “The Da Vinci Code” has lately brought swarms of conspiracy-minded tourists. One of them was a man who tried one day to take a sledgehammer to the so-called Apprentice Pillar, convinced that the Holy Grail was hidden inside it.
No harm done, but the event illustrated, as Mr. Mitchell noted, why scans are necessary. “Remember Windsor?” he asked, referring to the fire in 1992 that burned parts of the British royal castle. “If restorers had had laser scans back then, they could have rebuilt everything to within three millimeters of accuracy, but instead they had to rely on conjecture from photographs.” He noted the more recent case of the Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up in 2001...
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Aside from the wee bit of Scottish blood in three of the four enshrined presidents (Lincoln’s the odd man out, in case you’re wondering), there is of course nothing whatsoever Scottish about this most all-American of sites. But cultural expertise transcends national borders. The Scottish team of four or five will spend a few days setting up and moving around their various scanners to capture all of Mount Rushmore’s nooks and crannies, collecting billions of bits of digital information, which will then be brought back here, to be crunched and sorted out by computer.
What results should be the most complete and precise three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of times more detailed and accuratethan the best photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction of a millimeter...
... The cultural implications of the technology are big, as are the political ones for Scotland, which, via the country’s culture minister, Michael Russell, has latched on to the laser team’s work.
It was about three years ago that Mr. Pritchard’s art school group began surveying a swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes. They caught the attention of Mr. Mitchell, who enlisted Mr. Pritchard to scan a decaying iron bridge in Dundee, which was nearly impossible to survey with much accuracy except by laser. The bridge project led to scans of Stirling Castle and Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th-century Gothic fancy to which “The Da Vinci Code” has lately brought swarms of conspiracy-minded tourists. One of them was a man who tried one day to take a sledgehammer to the so-called Apprentice Pillar, convinced that the Holy Grail was hidden inside it.
No harm done, but the event illustrated, as Mr. Mitchell noted, why scans are necessary. “Remember Windsor?” he asked, referring to the fire in 1992 that burned parts of the British royal castle. “If restorers had had laser scans back then, they could have rebuilt everything to within three millimeters of accuracy, but instead they had to rely on conjecture from photographs.” He noted the more recent case of the Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up in 2001...