2009-Present

LIDAR, a technique that uses lasers to determine distance to/color of/other properties of a target point, was recently used to scan the ancient Roman ruins found at Stabiae. Can't say much more about the project until later!

Since LIDAR performs a discrete sampling on the environment, it returns what is known as a point cloud -- a huge set of points <x, y, z> in space, an intensity/opacity, and <r, g, b> color. In graphics (on current generation graphics hardware) we deal with not points but triangles. Because of this, some sort of triangulation must be applied to the point cloud to form a mesh prior to rendering.

The screenshots below are preliminary results of my triangulation of parts of the point cloud data of Stabiae.

Uncompressed triangulation, ~135k triangles

Compressed triangulation, ~40k triangles

Section with notable holes in mesh

Updates will follow as we move forward.