Saving the world's wonders in 3-D - thestar.com

Description

GLASGOW–Canadian laser wizard Douglas Pritchard surveys Glasgow from a glittering development on the River Clyde. On the far side of a channel lies the shiny, bulging shape of the science centre, like an aluminum amoeba that has swallowed something large and stopped to sleep it off. Beside it stands the new glass-and-steel headquarters of BBC Scotland and, farther off, the clustered metal shells of Glasgow's concert hall.

This stretch of river is one of Britain's most transformed environments. In Glasgow's industrial heyday, the river was packed with shipping and from its yards came the greatest ships afloat.

Pritchard, an architect by training, is acutely alive to the flow of time as it erodes the structures of the past. His work is to prevent it, and where he can't, to create a record so perfect and accessible that anyone could visit it at home on their computer.

His Glasgow imaging team has seized the global lead in an esoteric craft – using laser beams to scan built objects into three-dimensional models.

Now, in an international collaboration, Pritchard's team at the Glasgow School of Art will soon be creating perfect records of such structures as the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China.

A native of Winnipeg, Pritchard graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1990 and wound up in Toronto as a watershed moment occurred in the technology that enables architects to display their thinking.

"Architects are trained to think spatially," he said. "We think in three dimensions. We envision a structure in three dimensions and build it in three dimensions. But we represent it in two dimensions. So the client, who is not trained to think spatially, has to interpret it.

"In Toronto in the late 1990s, that started to change. There was a buzz in the air about representing things in three dimensions. (Toronto architect) Jack Diamond used a system called Lightscape. He would generate a computer model of a building, and then go through it adding lights ... You could tell the computer, `Put a 60-watt bulb here; put a fluorescent light there.'"

Pritchard immersed himself in new software like Discreet Logic, from Montreal, and Toronto-designed Alias Wavefront that launched draftsmen into the third dimension.

What emerged were building models that anyone with a computer could understand. In Pritchard's phrase, the viewer could "fly through" a building, gaining a crucial understanding – how it fit with its environment.

"In the midst of boom and change," he said, "there's a real danger of losing a city. People can't easily visualize the impact of developers' proposals. In two-dimensional drawings, things can look less imposing, less destructive of the old environment. With three dimensions, you see it as it is."

Pritchard moved to Glasgow in 2002 and was in place when the city came looking for someone to make an interactive, accessible, easy-to-use model of a four-square-kilometre swath of land called the River Clyde corridor, where development interest was intense.

In the world of contemporary animation, where online gamers zip among solar systems at the twitch of a mouse, a 3-D model of some streets may not sound impressive. But think about it. Nobody really knows what the Andromeda galaxy looks like: you can make it any way you like. Pritchard's models, on the other hand, are faithful recreations. They are accurate to a degree never before achieved. If you took one of Pritchard's building scans and used it to calculate the area that was glass, your cleaner could order the right amount of Windex down to the last thimbleful.

When he started on the Glasgow project, Pritchard was using a technology called photogrammetry, where masses of photographs were assembled into a 3-D image by modellers. It was cumbersome and slow, and demanded too much human decision for Pritchard's taste. He wanted a system that could capture data quickly and "indifferently" – recording everything without subjective influence. He chose a laser scanner...

Original URL

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/708676--saving-the-world-s-wonders-in-3-d

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/708676--saving-the-world-s-wonders-in-3-d