Ben Kacyra: Ancient wonders captured in 3D

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 an ancient metropolis

on the outskirts of their camp.

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 at the same time they excited him.

And the dad used to use those bulls

to tell the boy 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.

Female Voice: Long range laser scanning

by sending out a pulse that's a 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.

Ben Kacyra: You can 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 ten thousand 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 ten years ago,

my wife and I started a foundation to do good,

and right about that time,

the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas,

hundred and eighty 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

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 CyArk,

which stands for Cyber Archive.

To date, with the help of

a global network of partners,

we've completed close to fifty 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, Mt. 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 [the] 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.

And here, this is a fly-through

the cloud of points of Tikal,

and here you see it rendered

and photo-textured with the 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.

And 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 are 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

it was accelerating.

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 piece -- and a significant piece --

of our collective memory.

Imagine us as a human race

not knowing where we came from.

Luckily, in the last two or three decades,

digital technologies have been developing

that have helped us to develop tools

that we've brought to bear

in the digital preservation,

in our digital preservation war.

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 CyArk 500 Challenge --

and that is to digitally preserve

500 World Heritage Sites

in five years.

We do have the technology

that's scaleable,

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, 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,

a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda,

the Royal Kasubi Tombs.

The work was done successfully in the field,

and the data was archived

and publicly disseminated

through the CyArk 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:

"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.

(Applause)

Thank you.

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.

(Laughter)

The two wizards that I have

that are behind the curtain

will help me bring

the results on the screen.

(Applause)

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.

(Laughter)

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 Scotland.

David.

(Applause)

And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of

Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art.

Let's give them a hand.

(Applause)

Thank you.