California non-profit using lasers to archive cultural landmarks

Moai of Rappa Nui.  Image: CyArk

With the rise of the information age and exponential increases in hard drive storage space that have become available, our society has gradually evolved into one of obsessive archiving.  Whether it's the Catholic Church digitizing sermons and edicts or Google's controversial plan to scan every book ever made, the evidence is clear: we have developed a love affair with digitally hoarding as much information as we can.  Following the inevitable expansion of this obsession and transcending beyond mere written word, a visionary California non-profit organization has taken this fetishistic archiving to the next level.

Founded in 2002 by engineer Ben K. Kacyra, one of the pioneers of 3D laser imaging, CyArk was launched with the mission of preserving highly detailed architectural and archaeological records of cultural heritage landmarks.  Sites such as the Ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and even the Presidio of San Francisco have all been given CyArk's treatment, and now are safeguarded away down to the tiniest detail for future posterity in a complex High Definition Document (HDD) file.

Using a combination of methods such as traditional surveying, panoramic photography, GPS technology and (the key component) 3D laser scanning, CyArk is able to reduce the dimensions of these once irreplaceable sites to a literal million point data set, indicating everything from geophysical location down to the smallest angle change or irregularity on the surface.  The most immediate practical benefit being that, given the correct materials, these historical landmarks could actually be rebuilt within a fraction of a millimeter's accuracy.  In fact perfect miniature replicas have already been produced on a small scale via state-of-the-art 3D printers.

Having already identified an increasing number of historical sites in danger of natural and man-made hazards, among them the Mission San Juan Capistrano just an hour north of San Diego, CyArk plans to expand their archive as quickly as possible.  Simultaneously they will also be "teaching others to fish" by sharing training and software with local cultural heritage organizations, enabling them to maintain up-to-date data sets on their own.

And it's not just historical sites than can be preserved with these methods either.  Imagine having access to a digital archive of an entire city so that in the event of a natural disaster historical downtown street-fronts could be flawlessly reproduced.  Such an archive could have proved invaluable for rebuilding New Orleans after the devastating 2005 Hurricane Katrina, and could yet help recover many historical California cities in the event of a large scale earthquake.

Whether it's the possibility of recovery or simply the innate drive to compile as much knowledge and information about ourselves as we possibly can, CyArk represents a massive leap forward toward this aim by combining existing field data gathering methods with their own cutting edge laser technology.  Looking toward the future it's certainly no stretch of the imagination to think that, given the ever-changing and volatile world in which we live, these digital archives may someday be one of mankind's only detailed links to the past.