30/04/19
Residency Summary
Over the course of this residency, I’ve been mining a 3D laser scan of the Ancient Stabiae heritage site in Italy, which was made by the CyArk project (see above).
I’ve been interested in the scan in two main ways:
1) As the Lidar scan has a radius, I've been exploring how the quality of recorded information in the 3D scan depends on proximity of objects to the Lidar scanning device (which was placed in the centre of the scan). I've had a particular interest in the quality of objects recorded on the periphery of the scan.
Objects that are further away from the Lidar device in the centre of the scan are imperfectly recorded; objects which are closer are recorded in higher density. Responding directly to the latter, my first series of visual experiments was specifically interested how could I show this hierarchy of scanned objects within the scan.
Through a series of experiments I developed composite images that showed the way that the resolution of architectural objects scanned decays in quality the further outside the centre of the scan one goes. I produced a series of composite images using this method. These chart the Lidar recorder's spectrum of interest, which can be seen in the variations of recording resolution:
2) I then moved onto experimenting with the Lidar scans’s visualisation of depth and perspective, with the aim of connecting this to questions about the medium’s role in recording objects of historical value.
Towards the end of the residency I made an animated video produced from animations of various architectural forms found in the Ancient Stabiae scan. This marks the start of a body of research which will be exploring how perspective and depth in Lidar scans can be illusory:
I also made a series of composite images from experiments into how multiple angles and scales from buildings in the scan can be viewed en masse (an updated sort of Cubism, if you will):
While these experiments are limited in the nature of their exploration because of the residency’s duration, they are tools that I will now be extending beyond this residency and applying to other lidar scans. Thanks for watching the experimentation develop, it’s been an interesting exploratory process. Thanks to Sink for supporting the developments!
You can download the detailed interactive pdf copy of this research blog, with working hyperlinks, for viewing here. This traces the steps of how how the residency developed over April 2019: download.
More of my work using Lidar at the below links: