Notes from the Trenches: Week 5/5!
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| EnVision Heritage scanning...an image so cool we're inserting it twice! |
Pardon our delay over the holidays, here's the latest update from Dr. Kathleen Deagan at the excavations at the Mission Nombre de Dios that wrapped up last month:
It’s been 2 weeks [eta 4 weeks] since our last
update – we did not work during Thanksgiving week, and spent last week cleaning
the foundations to prepare for laser scanning. But all the cleaning was worth it, thanks largely to Phil Gulliford and Bob Kennedy’s
expertise with brushes and trowels!
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| Bob cleaning the trenches. |
On Friday, Professor Marty Hylton, Dr.
Sujin Kim and doctoral student Leisha Chen from the University of Florida EnVision Heritage program worked until
dark, scanning the site with their laser scanner. It is an amazing process and is being used to
document whole buildings, archaeological sites and even towns in super-precise
3-D digital imagery. They are especially committed to documenting
resources that are threatened by sea level
rise or other dangers. These images
could theoretically be printed in extraordinary detail by a 3-D printer.
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| EnVision Heritage first run version. |
Check out their website: https://dcp.ufl.edu/historic-preservation/envision-heritage/
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| Marty Hylton explaining the scanner. |
Marty took the time to explain to the
crew how this worked. The laser scanner
is mounted on a tripod and revolves 360 degrees, capturing everything the
scanner sees from that location. They move
the scanner around the site to scan virtually any perspective – probably 20 or
more scans, with each one containing at least one reference point that was in
the previous rotation. The scanner
records millions of points, each with x, y and z coordinates (typically an east coordinate, a north coordinate
and an elevation). This creates a “point cloud” that takes shape in 3-D – in
this case, our site in 3-D.
The image included here was produced
just hours after the scanning took place as a first run to see if the point
cloud captured the site. This will be manipulated with software to give us
multiple perspectives on the foundations.
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| Leisha doing detail photos. |
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| Marty with laser scanner. |
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| Scanning team! |
And as if that was not amazing enough,
they simultaneously recorded the site with photogrammetry – thousands of digital
photos of every inch of the site, each containing a reference point. They used a traditional digital camera – some
on a boom that takes 5 photos at once (no, that is not a weapon Sujin is holding) and some hand held for more detail. These can be “stitched” together by the
reference points, and also creates a point cloud. When
the laser point cloud and the photo point cloud are combined, we will have a
3-D model of the foundations in super hi-res photo realism.
Cool or what?
Cool or what?
We will be back at the site (barring
rain) for a few days this week for some final documentation and preparing the
site for the next phase. We have some
new and somewhat puzzling finds, and are
working with Architect Herschel Shepard and Prof. Tim Johnson to interpret these
– and that will be in the next blog entry.
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| Sujin with boom camera. |
Check out all of the updates here:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
