It’s end of semester here in Australia. That means final presentations. I tutored the graduation project subject for UNSW’s architectural computing degree¹ so I got to see their work presented on Wednesday.

Tl;dr: Free photogrametry and mesh networks could be used to document historical buildings and artefacts if they are at risk of a nutter blowing them up.

One of the projects by Aram Odesh was about using free photogrametry tools to preserve historic buildings. His argument was that major buildings would get laser scanned eventually by groups with big budgets, but there was a gap at the other end of the market that would slip through the cracks. His project was a comparison of the tools that you can use to scan buildings and objects using a mobile phone. The idea being that enthusiast groups would build up libraries of historic buildings in some, as yet unbuilt, repository².

This got me thinking about how this kind of citizen scanning might be useful in other situations.

Could we use this to build 3D maps of cities? I’d imagine that self driving cars will be constantly mapping the cities that they are in, but they won’t be everywhere. That leaves a gap where they don’t, or can’t, go. Citizen scanning could plug that gap, but so could extra investment from rich cities and corporations who want the data.

The other angle is military³. There’s a lot of action going on in various old cities. My guess is that these cities change fast and are therefore are probably pretty poorly mapped. They also have a bunch of important historical stuff in them. Military groups spend a long time scanning cities before they invade them. This lets them do simulations, work out what’s around the next corner, that kind of thing. They send in drone planes with scanners on them to do this. The planes are mesh networked so that if one is lost there is minimal information lost.

There are a bunch of messaging apps that work by mesh networking. These are for places where the network isn’t up to speed. That’s either places like SXSW where there are a zillion people, or places where there just isn’t a network.

I’m imagining a situation where citizens⁴ can create a mesh network, then use that for all the regular stuff a normal network is used for. Including scanning artefacts of historical importance⁵. Something along the lines of Heritage artefacts are unique, but we can always make another life.]. Then you could set priorities on the network so that vital messages got moved quickly and scan data got pushed whenever there was space.

Turns out that this isn’t a new idea (I doubt anything I think up ever is). Project Mosul is doing this but without the mesh networks.

Kathmandu by nFrames on Sketchfab

URC Ventures are doing it too. They’ve got some really cool videos of the results.

Luna Park, Sydney Australia from URCV on Vimeo.

This is just another one of those situations where someone can put two existing technologies together to solve a problem!