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UK’s largest light festival visits London L


ight installations have illuminated London as part of Lumiere 2016, the country’s largest light festival, which took place from 14 to 17 January. The event saw the capital’s most famous locations lit by 30 works of art created by leading artists. Lumiere, developed by creative producers


Artichoke, first debuted in Durham in 2009 and was held in London for the first time. Iconic pieces of architecture across four of London’s most exciting areas – King’s Cross, Mayfair, Piccadilly, and Trafalgar Square and Westminster – were transformed with 3D projections, interactive installations and other extraordinary light works.


Highlights of the Lumiere festival included


an enormous net sculpture hanging in Oxford Circus representing the catastrophic Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Its creators, Janet Echelman and Studio Echelman, used data from NASA to create a 3D image of the phenomenon, the basis of which was used to create the shape of the piece. Audiences could also play with the sculpture using an app – powered by Atom Bank – that manipulated the light and patterns projected onto it. Another stand-out piece was a collection of giant illuminated plants with multi-coloured leaves, bringing a taste of the tropics to the city’s wintry January. ‘Garden of Light’ was


created by TILT, a French collective set up by François Fouilhé and Jean-Baptiste Laude in order to give prominence to light art. As sensors and lasers become more freely


available to artists, many have jumped at the chance to make their art interactive, and light art like that seen at Lumiere is becoming more and more popular. Another example of artists using photonics technologies to light up public spaces is London-based design studio Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), which used drones, lidar and CT scans to create a virtual reality experience in Grizedale forest in the Lake District, UK. The project, called ‘In the Eyes


of the Animal’, takes users on a journey that allows them to fly above the forest canopy, come face-to-face with high definition creatures and embody various animals as they traverse the Grizedale landscape. Artistically interpreting the sensory world of the animals, MLF built a real-time system that dynamically visualises precise lidar scans of the forest and CT scans of the animals. Visitors were not only able to hear the animals’ environment through headphone- delivered audio, but were also able to ‘feel’ the sounds thanks to a wearable Sub Pac device that turns the audio vibrations into a tactile experience.


English Cathedral analysed by a Leica laser scanner A Leica laser scanner has been


used by experts at The University of Nottingham in the UK to capture a detailed, virtual record of the interior of Lincoln Cathedral and reveal clues to its architectural past.


Existing floor plans for the historic monument are in excess of a century old and do not accurately represent the building as it stands today. The scan results will act as a digital blueprint to work from if any part of the building is ever damaged, helping to future-proof the cathedral for generations to come.


The completed scans also tie in with the £16m Lincoln Cathedral


Connected project, which aims to tell the stories of the building in new ways and transform the site with a new visitor centre. Additionally, it is hoped that the scans could lead to the creation of a virtual tour of the cathedral, incorporating augmented reality, to allow visitors to see areas that are normally out of reach or have changed over the years. Dr Lukasz Bonenberg, senior experimental officer at Nottingham University’s Geospatial Institute, led the scans at the cathedral in November to help build up a picture of the cathedral’s architectural history.


A £70,000 Leica P20 laser 12 ELECTRO OPTICS l FEBRUARY 2016 Light sculpture representing the Japanese tsunami in 2011


scanning technology was used to measure how surfaces in its field of view reflect the laser light in order to create colour-coded images that render the scene in 3D. The scanner can record up to half a million individual 3D measurement points per second on surfaces and can rotate 360 degrees in six minutes.


‘It would be almost impossible to use conventional methods to collect data on the same scale – something that would take weeks, if not months, took the scanner only a few hours to record,’ explained Bonenberg. Scans of the cathedral nave were also taken, as it has no


existing floor plan, along with the Chapter House interior and its 20-metre high roof. The scanner generated 300 million measurement points for the Chapter House alone. Using the latest Leica Cyclone 9.0 software, the scientists could acquire detailed virtual models of the cathedral interior and roof space. ‘From the computer model


we hope to eventually develop a 3D-printed model of the Chapter House roof, which will help experts to answer questions about the roof’s construction, and how and why it has changed over the centuries, without having to revisit the monument,’ added Bonenberg.


@electrooptics | www.electrooptics.com


Janet Echelman/Studio Echelman/Artichoke


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