Event Title
Closing the Loops: Using Iteration to Document a Structure's Life History and Create Realistic Virtual Recreations
Location
PSY-228B
Start Date
3-11-2017 10:00 AM
End Date
3-11-2017 11:00 AM
Description
One constant exists with humanity is wherever people have extended their domains, they have built structures. From the early humans leaving wood structures, to Egyptian pyramids, to the palace at Versailles, to the Tokyo Tower, and to Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, humans have erected structures as a mark of civilization at a particular moment. While each of these structures conveys information about the society that constructed them, only the most recent have living representatives to testify to the thoughts of the community when they were erected.
The ChronoPoints initiative documents Post World War II structures which afford the opportunity to speak with those who were involved with a building's development and can provide unique stories that record the structure's "life history." This is akin to Deep Mapping which is principally used to create archives of disparate information about a particular location. ChronoPoints aims to deploy these assets to create more realistic entities for virtual recreations. The life history informs beyond the capture of a structure's physical evolution but also addresses its communal evolution. This assists in demonstrating how a community saw itself and how that vision changed over time.
To capture accurate representations of a selected structure, we utilize a laser scanner and conduct extensive photography. This data is then combined with traditional materials, such as historic photographs and blueprints, to digitally recreate a place (as many no longer exist or have been extensively modified) to use in virtual environments and augmented applications. This allows us today to see a building at what might have been the zenith of its glory. Oral histories, personal photographs, artifacts, and ephemera enable researchers to gain a sense of place in the community and human history for such structures.
The digital reconstruction process is multi-phased and iterative and uses collected materials to elicit additional memories and refine models. This allows the capture of a continually improving understanding of the structure's history and where a community was and its evolution. Using this process, we start with laser scanning a structure with terrestrial and/or aerial equipment. This provides a point cloud to base a model from, using either the precise measurements collected or meshing the point cloud into a model comprised of polygons.
After building a basic model, iterative use of available photos, blueprints and most importantly reflections of people who provided life to the structure allow for increasing levels of detail, as the model closes in on the tangential reality of the past. Through the loops of iterative development, contributors who are elicited to supply their memories can slowly be drawn into the recreated structure by viewing it on a monitor and later experiencing it using head mounted devices like the HTC Vive or Microsoft HoloLens. Using this process, the virtual recreations benefit by being higher quality, while gathering a wealth of information about their significance.
Closing the Loops: Using Iteration to Document a Structure's Life History and Create Realistic Virtual Recreations
PSY-228B
One constant exists with humanity is wherever people have extended their domains, they have built structures. From the early humans leaving wood structures, to Egyptian pyramids, to the palace at Versailles, to the Tokyo Tower, and to Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, humans have erected structures as a mark of civilization at a particular moment. While each of these structures conveys information about the society that constructed them, only the most recent have living representatives to testify to the thoughts of the community when they were erected.
