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Bah, Humbug!
Grrrr. Anyway, here's a pointer to the article. Since I don't expect that link to work for more than a couple of days, I'm going to reprint the article below, for posterity.
History of The Main captured in 3-D
| ROBERTO ROCHA | |
| The Gazette |
Friday, April 14, 2006
To preserve the dingiest part of The Main, architecture professor Michael Jemtrud is using the some seriously high technology.
The researcher at the Carleton University Immersive Media Studio developed a way to combine three sophisticated yet incompatible computer modelling techniques. With it, his team will capture the history of St. Laurent Blvd. between Ontario St. and Rene Levesque Blvd. before developers have their way with it.
The new technology is not only a leap for urban planners and architects, it also sparked the interest of other high-tech sectors.
While Jemtrud studied architecture at McGill University, he was dismayed at what he saw as the slow gentrification of St. Laurent.
"It's losing the multicultural feel," he said. "It's sad seeing those fancy restaurants and expensive stores that slickefy the street."
The urge to preserve the historical character doubled when the city started talking about giving the lower part a facelift.
"There's just something beautiful in the mess that is St. Laurent,"said Jemtrud, 38.
The idea was to make a large-scale interactive presentation of the street's history, its present, and its possible future. But no technology existed to present something that large in such high detail.
So Jemtrud invented it.
With a $1-million grant from Canadian Heritage, he gathered top architecture students at Carleton, McGill and elsewhere. The high tech came from partnerships with IBM and advanced animation software-makers Virtools and Alias (now Autodesk), whose programs are popular among Hollywood studios.
His team of 36 took photographs of the street's buildings and fed them into a computer, which transformed them into geometrical shapes. Then, using traditional three-dimensional modelling, they created rotating reproductions of the buildings.
This spring, he will bring high-definition laser scanners and capture the street's facades.
"Now, how do you take all these data sets from laser scanning to 3-D modelling and put them all together? That's what we do best to get an accurate, high-resolution model," Jem-trud said.
The software his team is developing makes these once-incompatible techniques meld. The result is a digital model of staggering accuracy and detail.
"If you need to reproduce the tiny bumps on plaster, you can," he said. "Then we have to make it interactive and displayable in different formats like the Web."
The applications for this integration technology are far and wide, Jemtrud said. Even though the work is halfway done, it has the attention of companies that deal with scientific visualization, video-game developers, city governments, even the military.
"The models are so accurate, you can do a simulation of whatever," he said.
The final results will be shown next March at the Society for Arts and Technology, another project partner conveniently located on that part of St. Laurent. Jemtrud is hoping to project a full-scale model of the street and offer an immersive virtual-reality tour.
"We really want people to experience the history of this part of The Main," he said.
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And although he originally studied at McGill, it also looks as if he's actually a professor at *Carleton*.
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(That said, its quite possible that what the Gazette reported is a gross distortion and the actual software is much more sophisticated than it sounds).
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