HOW do you study several thousand dinosaur footprints spread across 2 kilometres of a soft-rock outcrop at a slant of 60 degrees? Zap them with a laser.
The footprints, at the Fumanya site in the southern Pyrenees in Spain, record the passage of huge long-necked dinosaurs called titanosaurs across a muddy area about 70 million years ago. The problem is that the footprint layer is soft and crumbling, and climbing the steep surface could damage the tracks.
So Phil Manning of the University of Manchester, UK, and his team scanned the surface with LIDAR - a laser technique that maps features in a similar way to radar. The scanner and allied software generated a detailed 3D contour map of the surface and prints (Palaeontology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2008.00789.x).
Radiohead just released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”.
No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.
Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data.
