Cyberarchaelogy: Photographing The Pharaohs In 3D
Few people are capable of carrying an Egyptian temple home with them, but that's exactly what researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), did—with permission, of course.
In a proof-of-concept trial to evaluate the CAVEcam photography equipment in the hot, dusty, blindingly bright conditions of the Nile River Valley, Dr. Greg Wickham and Adel Saad of the Visualization Lab at KAUST and Thomas A. DeFanti of UCSD's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) captured high-resolution images of stunning historic cultural sites at Luxor.
Shooting in the scorching desert heat from 6am to 9pm for two days in a row, the expedition was challenging. A single grain of sand could obstruct a camera shutter, so the equipment was carefully stored in plastic bags and cases. The team sampled about 20 sites with the CAVEcam, including pillars at Karnak, Medinet Habu, and floodlight-illuminated statues at the Temple of Luxor at dusk.
Crafting Lifelike Scenery
Only three of these CAVEcams exist: one with the inventor, Dick Ainsworth, and one each at KAUST and Calit2. The CAVEcam has two Lumix GF1 cameras that are positioned next to one another, like human eyes, to allow for the lifelike 3D effect.
The cameras are calibrated to take simultaneous 10 megapixel photographs, and for a single 360-degree panoramic scene, each camera shoots 72 photographs. The robotic GigaPan Epic Pro repositions the cameras at regular intervals for subsequent photographs to capture the entire scene, from sky to ground.
All of these photographs are painstakingly stitched together to create seamless, 3D panoramas that can be displayed in KAUST's CORNEA and NexCAVE visualization facilities.
"If all the focal points come in aligned together easily, you can have an image whipped up in about 12 hours. That's if everything goes smoothly and with a lot of expertise," Saad explained. "But some scenes require more finessing and can take up to a week to stitch."
Visualization Facilities
KAUST's visualization facilities are available for researchers, faculty, and students from all disciplines, enabling collaboration and new views of data sets.
NexCAVE is a passive 3D environment created by a scalable, modular setup that uses high-definition screens. Using 3D glasses and sensor-fitted headgear, which allows the system to detect where a user is looking and adjust the image accordingly, researchers, students, and faculty can visualize their research in 3D by loading 3D models, protein molecules, and simulations, for example.
CORNEA is a fully immersive 3D virtual reality environment that mimics reality by combining a 200 million pixel stereoscopic display and a spatial surround-sound audio system.
The visualization space is one of the most advanced virtual reality research systems in the world. Viewing the scenes captured at Luxor in CORNEA, Saad says, "you are looking at the sky, you are standing on the ground, you are seeing everything that you would see if you were in the place of the tripod."
"They say 'A picture is worth a thousand words,' " Saad says. "I believe NexCAVE and CORNEA is cube that. It's unreal."
A high-speed network between Calit2 and KAUST allows the lifelike images and simulations generated by researchers to stream from one university to the other, giving each facility the ability to view the 3D scenery.
Cutting-Edge Cyberarchaeology
With sight and sound available in these visualization facilities, the next step to replicating reality and preserving history for generations to come is to introduce touch. KAUST's facilities have haptics devices that allow an artifact to be viewed in 3D while being "felt" using force-feedback equipment that resembles a pen. This technology is also used in videogames, where a player's control pad vibrates when certain instances occur in the game (i.e. impact of falling, starting a car engine).
"I can look at a 3D image of a piece of ceramics and feel the holes and little chips in it exactly to the same detail of what I'm looking at," Saad says. "The object seems like it's in front of me, and I'm actually touching it, without it actually being there."
This technological combination can allow, for example, researchers from around the world to study the same artifacts—without worrying about shipping, destroying, or contaminating them. What's more, Saad says, "we could walk through a tomb, completely undisturbed and untouched; do a 3D scan; and recreate the artifacts.
Archaeologists with access to a unit like the NexCAVE can check them out, see how they were arranged in their original positions, handle them—all virtually without disturbing any of the real artifacts."
"In the field of archaeology, the sites are disappearing," Saad says. Using world-class visualization facilities and collaborations, such as the one between KAUST and Calit2, these historic sites can be preserved and made digitally available in fully immersive environments for generations to come.