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Laser-Scanning U.S. Landmarks
MeanMF writes "The New York Daily News reports in this article that the National Park Service is creating detailed 3-D maps of national monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore using high-resolution laser scanners. Their goal is to create highly-accurate blueprints that can be used to reconstruct the monuments if they are damaged by a terrorist attack or other means." The same story is also available at Yahoo!.
Would we really want to replace them though? Seems to me this would be like rebuildign the World Trade Centers exactly like they were, and noone is suggesting that, so why would monuments be different?
Lady Liberty is sexy sexy sexy! They forgot to mention her heaving bosom though.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
It's one thing to rebuild the Statue of Liberty, I can see how that might be accomplished (albeit at quite a cost).
What I dont' get is...why Mt. Rushmore? They're going to have one hell of a time re-carving that thing back into the mountain, expecially after being demolished by something...well, big enough to blow something like that up.
Cool idea, all in all though.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
Not to sound crass or anything, but is that really what people would want? If an historic monument is destroyed, replacing it doesn't mean that it never happenend, it just means that it was replaced.
I would think that if something like this were to happen, then some new, awe-inspiring monument could be built. However, It seems to me that there has been a dearth in people eligible for immortalization in a mountain face (for example) for quite a while now.
Sure gives a new meaning to the phrase "disaster recovery", don't it? Altough, if restoring from tape is a bitch, now imagine this one...
no one would know the replacements weren't *exact*, would they?
How many millions do they intend to spend to replicate every ding and pidgeon dropping aquired over decades and not intended by the original artist in the first place?
When you total your car, you can have it fixed or you can buy a new one, but attempting to *duplicate* the old one down to the placement of the least little old molocule not only pretty much defines "prohibitively expensive", but A: Isn't possible, and B: As an idea is just plain doofey.
KFG
This is very important. If our monuments are destroyed, we have to build them again exactly as they were before. That's because the key thing about monuments is not what they represent, but their particular physical specifications. By rebuilding exactly as before, we send a message to the terrorists that we keep very good records, and aren't afraid to use them.
Contrast this to the way our enemies behave. When we bomb their command centers, rather than rebuilding them exactly as they were before, they rebuild them to be more bomb proof. This shows how little respect for their own history they have.
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and replace him with a robot replica.
If anything happens to the Statue of Liberty, why not just send her back to France and get them to do warranty repair. I'm sure the French wouldn't mind, especially if you've purchased the extended warranty :)
Macka
[devil's advocate]
Shouldn't the US Gov concentrate harder on getting the DNA sequences of every American citizen, so that they can clone anyone killed in the terrorist attacks, wrather than focus on the materialistic parts of the country?
What's more important?
[/devil's advocate]
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
So the project wasn't started as a direct result of the attacks as this headline would lead you to believe.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
I'd imagine that if we were to give these plans to Lego, we'd have some really kickass home versions of all of the monuments. Or how about the 3D puzzle people? Or a craft store? There's consumeristic profit to be reaped from these laser scans...I wonder if the park system will see it.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I agree, to some extent, that the idea of replacing the Statue of Liberty, Mt Rushmore, the Capitol Building, or any other well-known national monument as exactly as possible is slightly silly. The comment made about replacing a car after a crash, and not wanting to replicate all of the origonal dings and scratches is somewhat reasonable.
But I think you're missing the point about the symbolism and memories contained in these monuments. If my car was totaled, I would be sad not only because I would have lost simply a means of transportation, but I would have lost a location where memories were made. Driving on the highway while friends taunted the 18 year-old engine ("Wow! It hit 55! You think it can get to sixty?"), packing 7 people into a 2-door hatchback, etc. I'd miss all that had happened in the car, as well as the car itself.
Likewise, losing the Statue of Liberty to terrorists, a giant space-crane, Godzilla, or whatever won't simply mean there's new real-estate open on Liberty Island. It'll mean a national monument that watched over hundreds of thousands of immigrants, saw the USA through two World Wars, a presidential assasination, putting people on the moon, the Cold War, Vietnam, etc, etc, etc, will be gone.
I use the Statue of Liberty as an example because I think it's America's 'best' and 'most important' monument. I don't particularly care for Mt. Rushmore (I think it's vaguely creepy), and the Capitol Building doesn't impress me much. The Statue of Liberty represents ideals that America hasn't always been great holding true to, I admit. I'll be the first to criticize the current administration and have no problem pointing out ways we've screwed up in the past. We've fucked up a lot, both internaly and with the rest of the world, and I'm sure we'll continue doing it. But I think the Statue of Liberty, or the Lincoln Memorial, or the Jefferson, or the Washington represent what is, has, and (I _really_ hope) will continue to be great about the USA.
So. I don't think mapping these monuments down to a quarter inch is 'silly' or 'stupid' or a 'waste of time.' Having recently visited New York and seen Lady Liberty up close, and still strongly remembering my 8th grade clase trip to Washington D.C., I would be heartbroken if any of a number of our national monuments fell. I can't honestly say I would support rebuilding the Statue of Liberty exactly as she stood. It would be kind of weird, I recognize that.
But I definatly think we should have the option. At the very least, it will allow for faithful 3D models to be replicated. Maybe someday my kids will be able to walk through a 3D model of New York City _exactly_ the way it stood on September 10th, 2001.
So maybe these 3D models will be completely useless, either because the monuments will not be attacked or because people won't want to rebuild them exactly the same.
But I think it would be a horrible shame not to have the option.
-Trillian
Who leaves a job like this up to college kids. I can just see a post-apocolyptic era in which the statue of liberty is a girl in a bikini waving a sign that says "Texas A&M blows" on it.
From the article:
"The world-famous lady has posed for millions of photos, but since her creator left no blueprints and only minimal design sketches, replacing her in the event of a catastrophic loss would have been all but impossible.
Nonsense. The difficulty would be the engineering, but quite far from "all but impossible." What laser mapping the surface does is give us an accurate measure of the skin (both inside and out). Laser mapping doesn't tell us jack about the underlying structure which is where the vast, vast majority of the work would be. And the skin can be replicated from the extremely high resolution pictures we already have.
In other words this makes a difficult task a bit easier. This does not bridge some do-or-die gap where if we didn't have it we couldn't accomplish the task.
My
Limekiller
boy, if you think this is waste, I've got a few government agencies to sell you. this is probably one of the better uses of our tax dollars (relatively speaking).
Just like our culture. Is this what the artists intended when they created these works?
It is a statue of Liberty, not a statue of Respect for History.
(imagines a giant copper statue of an elderly librarian with coke-bottle glasses, sitting behind a desk with a 'sssh!' gesture)
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Benjamin Coates
So they're reverse-engineering architectural features for the purpose of making replacement copies. I wonder if this falls under the jurisdiction of the DMCA?
Hopefully it would fall under 'fair use' as it is (reportedly) for backup purposes.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Then terrorists may be able to use it to their advantage to find weakspots in (for eg) Mount Rushmore. I imagine they will be able to find flaws in rushmore that could be exploited by high explosives.
Well, There's this exhaust port, but it's at the end of this narrow canyon and only like two meters wide...
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Benjamin Coates
so far every post I've read is complaining about "taxpayers money at work" or "why bother?"...you're looking at it the wrong way-
think of the uses of these maps!
ut2003, doom3, quake 10, counterstrike:anti-terrorist unit, etc... what ever.
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About two years ago, I worked for Cyra, the company whose Cyrax 2500 they are using to scan these monuments. The device is pretty cool, but expensive at US $125,000 for one unit, not including any license seats of the Cyclone software you need to manipulate the HUGE data sets that the device generates. All you get from the device is a cloud of individual points. It really takes the software that runs on the PC (Cyclone) to turn the point clouds into surfaces and then into files compatible with CAD systems like AutoCAD and Microstation.
By the way, it is a good thing that none of these monuments that they are scanning with the Cyrax 2500 are red. The green laser used by the unit doesn't even see some shades of red. There was a bright red toolbox in the lab that would crash the scanner every time until we got the "no-return timeout" code right.
It's too bad the company is in such a bad financial situation. The device is really cool, but the slowing US economy has really put the brakes on large capital expenditures like the Cyrax 2500, even though many studies have shown that the labor costs savings and the improved accuracy of the results more than make up for the cost of the device and the training.
For those of you who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a Cyrax 2400 (the previous model) was used to scan the existing I-880 / US-101 interchange in order to obtain a starting point for designing the new interchange they are currently building. The next time you are travelling south-bound on I-880 near the Montague Expressway exit, look at the paved shoulder and see if the spray-painted "scan 101" etc. marks are still there, indicating where the parked the "scan van" to take each of the scans they stitched together to get the entire interchange model.
I guess I've rambled on long enough...
Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...
For something like the Statue of Liberty that's not overly big and that you can scan from the ground, 1 or 2 people could probably do the ~10-20 scans it would probably need in about a day. All you would need to do would be to rope off the area immediately around the scanner (ie. no need to close the Statue of Liberty while they're doing it). A Cyrax 2500 I believe sells for the order of ~100 US kilobucks. Rental on it for a day or two, you can estimate as well as I can.
As for computing power to process the scans, all you need is Cyra's software running on a high end PC. For something like the Statue of Liberty, say 10-20 scans, simple stitching together, you're talking one skilled modeler working on it for maybe a day. Definitely not more than 1 person-week. I won't claim that all US landmarks would be this straightforward to scan, but this technology is very fast, very accurate, and cheap to use. Using old fashioned techniques (ie. photogrammetry), yes, this would cost a fortune. Photogrammetry would require scaffolding, closing the site, cutting and pasting photos, etc.
It actually wasn't the Italians, but a team from my alma mater, Stanford University, lead by professor Marc Levoy. While I wasn't directly involved in the project myself, I knew many of the folks behind it.
The project site is http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
After the French got together the money to build the Statue to gift us with and built it, they couldn't convince us to pony up the money to actually have the damn thing shipped over. It took Hearst and a bunch of media work to get enough people to pay for the transportation.
May we never see th
And these have been used in several movies. If you remember Starship Troopers from several years ago, the ending scene with the 2 humans captured in a cave with about a zillion "bugs". The initial Cyrax prototype system was used to scan and model the cave (a real life set made from styrofoam). With the computer model of the meatspace cave, the computer animators could add the bugs and not have them hanging in mid-air or their legs halfway buried in the floor, etc.
A 1st generation Cyrax (model 2400) was used to model the sharks in Deep Blue Sea. It was also used for the climax scene in some circa 1999 Arnold movie, whose title escapes me. There were several other movie uses that also escape me. Some disney/Robin Williams flick I think.
How do I know? I used to work for Cyra Technologies (www.cyra.com) from Aug 1998 to Apr 2000.
Cyra and several surveying companies that own Cyraxes (cyraxen?) do rent them out and rent out operators and modelers. Cyra and possibly others also provide training to cyrax customers.
As for the obligatory linux question, I'm sorry to disappoint you. The Cyrax 2500 runs a real time OS from ATI (no, not that ATI) called Nucleus on an embedded PowerPC processor. (Note: website appears to be down right now). There are other embedded processors also in the system. How do I know? I designed the initial versions of 3 circuit boards boards and 2 FPGAs for the Cyrax 2500. The PC-side modeling software runs under windoze NT (probably now 2K/XP--dunno; I left in 2000). The modeling software was originally prototyped on SGI boxes under opengl. It was ported to windoze before the first commercial release of a Cyrax.
All hope is not lost, however. One of the hats I wore while working there was linux sysadmin. We had 3 linux servers to run e-mail, web, and file servers for the firmware engineering and manufacturing groups. I don't know if this setup still exists after Cyra was bought by Leica Geosystems in early 2001.