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ABROAD

Scots Aim Lasers at Landmarks

Historic Scotland

A section of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, captured in minute detail with laser scanners. More Photos >

By MICHAEL KIMMELMANPublished: November 4, 2009

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

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three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of

times more detailed and accurate than the best

photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction

of a millimeter.

In an era of computer animation, with gamers navigating

virtual universes at the click of a mouse, making laser scans of old monuments may not

sound special, but the Scottish team has achieved some unprecedented levels of

sophistication with their models. Through scanning, the experts can conjure up what

objects looked like ages ago, in effect turning the clock back on ancient sites. They can

simulate the effects of climate change, urban encroachment or other natural or

man-made disasters on those same sites, peering into the future.

Given a proposal for a new building in a city like Edinburgh, they can also create virtual

realities, almost microscopically accurate, so viewers might see what the building looks

like from all angles in the place where it’s intended to go, including the shadows it might

cast at different times of day.

The technology isn’t brand new or unique to Scotland, but the Glasgow team is on its

cultural front line. Douglas Pritchard, a Canadian-born architect by training, is the

wizard behind the Digital Design Studio at the art school. He heads the Scottish laser

expedition with David Mitchell, director of Historic Scotland’s Technical Conservation

Group. Describing how fast laser modeling has progressed and how far it might soon go,

Mr. Pritchard said, “We’re no longer a million miles from the ‘Star Trek’ holodeck.”

He was perfectly serious.

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.

The basic principle behind the laser technology is simple: A box, with a laser inside, sits

on a tripod; as the box slowly rotates 360 degrees, the laser, moving up and down,

bounces its beam off whatever is solid in front of it. In so doing, it registers some 50,000

points in space every second. Traditional surveyors might produce a couple of hundred

measurements a day, prone to subjectivity and human error. Lasers collect millions of

measurements per hour. A scanner can even identify certain materials, determining

whether something is, say, made of glass or stone.

Aerial lasers and a hand-held version operate the same way. Combined, they can bring to

life as 3-D images entire cities or a mountainside, like Mount Rushmore’s.

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This spring, at a digital-documentation conference in Glasgow, Mr. Russell met with Ben

Kacyra, the American engineer and inventor of the scanner. Partly because of what had

happened to the Buddhas in Afghanistan, Mr. Kacyra had established the nonprofit

CyArk to compile scans of 500 Unesco World Heritage sites around the globe.

The Scottish crew was signed up to scan for CyArk five Scottish World Heritage sites (the

Old and New Towns of Edinburgh; Neolithic Orkney; the island of St. Kilda; New Lanark;

and the Antonine Wall, an ancient Roman ruin) as well as five other sites. Having been

already in touch with the Park Service about Mount Rushmore, CyArk enlisted the team

to start there.

What are the big cultural implications? For starters, Mr. Pritchard talked about “a new

kind of empowerment.” He was referring to the prospect of using virtual-reality models

to allow the public to judge all sorts of proposed urban plans. The drawings and

computer simulations long cooked up by developers and architects will be replaced by

more detailed, easier-to-comprehend, more objective views, in essence democratizing

knowledge.

The benefits of storing and distributing state-of-the-art views of the world’s most

precious cultural sites at low cost (the annual budget for the Scottish team is under a

half-million dollars) are obvious.

By way of example Mr. Pritchard showed off on his laptop a ruined Victorian monument,

Paisley Fountain. It was returned in virtual guise to its original lacquered green sheen,

thanks to some paint scraping taken by Scottish restorers. When combined with the laser

scans, the scrapings proved what the surface of the fountain first looked like. Nobody had

imagined it to have been so shiny. “But,” as Mr. Pritchard said, “technology doesn’t lie.”

Then he clicked on a virtual model of a Maori canoe, bought in pieces not long ago by the

National Museum of Scotland and never assembled. Laser scans proved it never could be:

the pieces turned out not to belong together.

The demonstration pointed toward some bright, gleaming, globalized frontier of cultural

information-sharing and progress, albeit curiously backward-glancing. In London at the

moment there happens to be an exhibition of paintings by the German-born British artist

Frank Auerbach from the 1950s and early ’60s, marvelous pictures that show the city

rebuilding as if from scratch after the war.

Back then, death and destruction held out for midcentury Modernists the prospect of a

new urbanism, a fresh start born of loss and industrial advances.

That was half a century ago.

The new cutting edge of laser technology offers instead a means to preserve and restore

whole cities exactly as they once were. It promises a world kept as if in amber.

A virtual past that never dies.

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