HERITAGE
“There’s a huge need
to capture information in these areas. Ideally
we’d capture information before a conflict arises”
to really come down. We work through local partner agencies, service providers and universities so that’s another way that price is continuing to drop.
What’s the rough cost now? It’s closer to $30,000 to $40,000 (£20,000 to £27,000, €28,000 to €38,000) per project. That includes everything from the capture, to processing the data. On certain projects we do a “scan and can” – just capturing the data and archiving it for the future – and that can be done, in some cases, for less than $10,000 (£6,800, €9,400) per site.
You’ve been operating for more than 10 years. How much has been spent so far on mapping these sites? About $10m to $15m (£7m to £10m, €9m to €14m), in terms of cash investment, as well the technology and other kinds of supporting donations that we’ve received.
How do you manage to make large amounts of data available to the public? One of the things that we prioritised from the beginning is making the archive accessible, particularly over the Web. We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out ways to manipulate the data and create derivatives from it that are easily shared and then consumed by the public.
WHAT IS THE CYARK 500?
CyArk 500 hopes to preserve 500 heritage sites worldwide over the course of the next five years. CyArk wants to preserve these sites from war, terrorism, arson, urban sprawl, climate change, earthquakes, floods and other threats, particularly in areas that could become too dangerous to map.
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Members of the heritage community can submit sites for consideration. Governments, organisations and individuals can nominate. The sites will be assessed and selected by an Advisory Council according to the criteria they helped develop. CyArk has completed 40 projects of the 500,
attractionsmanagement.com
including Pompeii, Babylon, Mount Rushmore, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Titanic wreck, the Sydney Opera House and the Tower of London. The feasibility of doing projects depends on access and funding. CyArk points out that it might be easier to raise funds for some sites than others.
KwaZulu-Natal University in Durban, South Africa, is a CyArk Technology Centre partner WHAT ARE CYARK TECHNOLOGY CENTRES?
CyArk Technology Centres are a partnership between CyArk and a university, community college or high school. The centres build skilled teams to help with CyArk’s digital preservation movement, and transfer skill sets in technology
into the local workforce. CyArk says the programme benefits a range of studies, including historical preservation, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, the STEM topics and environmental and spatial technologies (EAST).
Students gain
exposure to brand new technologies, training in the latest software and hardware, training in advanced documentation methodology, advanced skill development and CyArk certification.
In some cases we’ll develop lighter-weight or decimated versions of the 3D data and put that online. Sometimes we show the site with a fly-through animation or video, but there are different ways to make the data accessible, even if you’re not able to put a really large data set up online.
How does the scanning work from a commercial standpoint? We haven’t explored that too much yet. Our focus has been on building the archive and having that information available, should it be needed for the future. One of the things we’re starting to see both
in museums and other similar venues is there may be a real opportunity to license this data in a way that is both respectful to and generates revenue back to the site so they can also benefit from it.
How big is one project in terms of data size? Several terabytes per project. Some are a lot bigger and some are smaller, but very few projects now are under a terabyte. We have capacity for two petabytes and right now we’re at a couple of hundred terabytes. We can always expand.
You’ve done apps in conjunction with specific projects. Is that another way to share the data with the public? There’s always interest about how people are interacting with information and we try to get it to them in a format that’s relevant. We’ve worked on the mobile side and apps are great, particularly with some of the sites where connectivity is low. If you’re not going to get a good signal to pull up information on your phone, you can download the content of an app before you travel and augment your experience on site with this 3D data and the educational content we’ve developed. Fort Laramie in Wyoming, US, for example, has an iPhone and iPad app with
AM 2 2015 ©CYBERTREK 2015
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