3D Laser Scanning Gives Us a Glimpse of Pompeii
peeking at the past with 3D laser scanning services
The City of Pompeii was an old Roman city. We know the fate of that city. The unfortunate thing about living next to an active volcano is the fate that this city faced. In the 79 A.D. the fiery mountain blew its top, and then fire and ash rained down on the city, destroying the city. Those who were able to witness the event said that it was like thick blanket of ash dropped over the city. Needles to say that the whole city was deemed destroyed. It wasn’t until more recent times that some of the city remains were discovered. Those who discovered it were quite surprised to find that a lot of thing were still there. Buildings, articles used in daily life and even bones. It definitely wasn’t preserved enough for us to see what it looked like before the disaster. With the help of 3D laser scanning services, though, the original look can be brought back in digital form.
Virtually rebuilding the past
A group from Lund University took to the task of recreating some buildings from the ancient city of Pompeii using 3D laser scanning services. The group of experts from the Swedish university, in fact, scanned a whole block. How did they do that, you ask? What they did was carry in a 3D laser scanner and retrieve all the exact measurements of the walls and floors that were still intact. Of course, just looking at a bunch of ancient ash burned walls won’t really reproduce the feeling of what it would have originally looked like. So what they do is take those dimension and digitally rebuild the room as if they were undamaged. There is some guess work to do here, of course. The digital model then allows anyone to do a virtual walk through of the building just as if he or she were there before the disaster.
3D laser scanning captures the scene
Another interesting fact about Pompeii is the way the the victims were found. Those who were trapped and killed in the disaster can be seen in their original positions when the ash and fire fell. How could they still be there after 2,000 years? The bodies, of course, have decayed, but the ash that covered them, left a shell around them. CT scanning technology was also used to analyze the remains of the people of Pompei. The results of the scan show the victims bones and clothes. It is a sad scene, indeed. They even found the casts of some dogs and cats.
There, of course is no way for us to go back and see what things were really like in that ancient city. There were no cameras, and no videos to watch. We can do the best we can, though, with the testimonies of eye witnesses and the remaining artifacts left behind. This is just another example of how 3D laser scanning services is being used. We could say that 3D laser scanner is a type of time machine to allow us to peer into the past.