Could you explain exactly what Insight is?

Really what we are, more than anything, is an interface between archaeologists (loosely, people who study real things) and the people who are, often unbeknowst to them, innovating whole new approaches to looking at real things.  Instead of making sketches or taking pictures, for instance, people are now able to make 3D representations of objects, whether it’s a clay jug from a Turkish wreck or an entire mosque; we've done both.  We feel this kind of innovation has very striking possibilities for what is sometimes called the “cultural heritage” field, as a whole.  An amazing sequence of technological development (digital photography, laser scanning, video projection, QTVR, 3D on the web) has come about in the last ten years, and we believe that all of these innovations have immediate applications to archaeology.

Still, connections between new tool-makers and tool-users are hardly ever made, for several reasons.  First, these new tools almost always come out of the big-money world of industry, and are completely out of reach for researchers and academics.  So our response here is to provide these expensive new techniques to researchers without charge.  The second reason has more to do the fact that archaeologists and computer people are sometimes polar opposites, and so it isn’t going to occur to either group to reach out to the other.  Very simply archaeologists and computer people aren’t usually very aware of each other, which is a shame.  We work to cross-pollinate the disciplines, since there is a very great reward on both sides.

Our head Egyptologist, Dr. Philippe Martinez (philippe@insightdigital.org) is a case in point.  He has an extensive background in archaeology, but has also been able to work very successfully with technology.  The results are incredible to see.  So, in many ways Philippe is himself acting like an interface, a translator.  We try to help connect people, groups, ideas.  By occupying those borderlands we also become an interface between the 21^st century (where computers are pretty common) and the 19^th century (when drawings were the primary mode for describing things)

Do you develop the software and 3-D technology yourself?

Yes, we do write computer code ourselves to help make the connection between existing software packages—and we’re happy to share any code we have.  We are also currently working with commercial hardware and software vendors to help develop faster, easier workflows for our extremely challenging production situations.  For instance, this January, 2003, we will take a brand new laser scanning control system to Egypt that was created with the cooperation of Minolta Corp., who is providing the laser scanner and its control architecture, and Geometry Systems Inc. (GSI), who is writing custom code to control the scanner according to our detailed specifications.

Altogether, we use a whole constellation of research code and commercial applications.  For our more cinematic images, we use software from the movie industry (Alias|Wavefront’s Maya, Apple’s Shake).  Over the years we’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with some of the finest research minds in the field of computer science.  Wherever possible, we openly endorse their spectacular work.  Stanford’s Dr. Marc Levoy has been unstinting in his support, allowing us access to a brilliant suite of code first developed for his well-known Digital Michelangelo Project.  Also deserving of mention is the remarkable Dr. Paul Debevec at the Institute for Creative Technology (ICT), who has so successfully raised the bar for those who are attempting to create accurate, beautiful pictures of ancient sites.

Why is there a need to record and preserve data from archaeological sites?

Dramatic examples include the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, the recent damage to Machu Picchu at the hands of an American film crew, or the wholesale, organized theft of Khmer antiquities in Cambodia.  In these cases, we have absolutely lost part of the cultural record of humanity, and in each of these cases, the losses are clearly felt around the world.

If these sites had been documented with 3D scanning, it would actually be possible to continue to study these sites and pay them virtual visits.  It is even possible to recreate physical proxies from 3D data, which has incredibly exciting implications.  It is possible, even, to imagine returning head to the decapitated Young Memnon in the British Museum, or return copies of the Elgin marbles to the Parthenon centuries after they were removed by the British.

Fundamentally, many imperiled sites are deteriorating dramatically.  Good archaeological work takes time, and so while resources are spent documenting certain sites, equally deserving sites are forced to go without study.  The risk, of course, is that there may not be much left to record for posterity if and when the neglected sites are finally slated for documentation.  So in these cases we are working on ways to quickly document and publish a site as a hedge against that site’s ultimate disintegration.

Seems like documentation is ahead of preservation, due to financial, political and other obstacles.

That’s right, good documentation is often a necessary prerequisite for physical preservation—whether you consider a shellmound in Emeryville, California or a soon-to-be-flooded temple in China.  The need for documention before presevation is well illustrated by a Sufi Monument in Cairo that we scanned for the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE).  ARCE was already planning to restore the monument, and before they broke ground, they needed good documentation of the site.  The first reason for wanting documentation is just as a  reference document:  ARCE was studying the past plans for the building and this was in effect a high-resolution, accurate ground plan made in the year 2000.  And having good ground plans of the building as it stands, as opposed to how it was drawn hundreds of years ago, is very valuable for the restoration team as they begin work.  But even deeper, they wanted monitor how quickly the limestone facades of the monument were being eaten away by Cairo’s acid rain.  By documenting a precise state of the facade in 3D, it becomes possible to look and compare the exact state of the building in 2000 to its state in the future.  You can even put these 3D views together, creating a time lapse animation where you can actually see the disintegration of the surface over time.  The idea for this application came directly from ARCE, and it’s really an example of how creative people can be once they have a new tool to work with.

Please highlight a few of the projects that Insight has/is working on

One current project, and another good example of the link between documentation and restoration, is our project to digitally reconstruct a colossus of Ramsses II in Thebes.  In this case a decree had gone out from Madame Mubarak (Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s wife) that this ruin, destroyed by Christians in antiquity, should be rebuilt.  Literally hundreds of pieces remain in situ, but the task of putting the pieces together is, in the understated language of computer people “non-trivial”.  Dr. Christian Leblanc, who is in charge of the site, had led an extensive effort to sort out the massive remains of the colossus on the ground.  But what was really needed was a way to fit this jigsaw puzzle together in 3D space, if the real colossus was ever to be properly reassembled. 

So what we did in this case was to exhaustively document the most valuable fragments in 3D, which entailed spinning them around on steel caster plates in front of our laser scanning equipment.  The whole endeavor took an enormous amount of effort from our team, and on the part of the French workmen at the site.  But once we had those fragments in our 3D software, we were able to test-fit different possibilities and ultimately develop a reconstruction of the colossus.  Now our reconstruction can serve as a roadmap for reconstruction, and in fact can help a committee reach a consensus about whether or not the colossus should in fact be rebuild.  And we also made new discoveries that surprised everyone as we went along—among them, the fact that this colossus is certainly among the largest ever built in Egypt.

Dr. Paul Debevec (foreground) shooting panoramic
photos in Saqqara, Egypt while Katie Cole
(background) sneaks a shot in herself..
 

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