3DHOP for speleoarchaeology

Hello everybody,

today I go on writing about our speleoarchaeological project on the natural cave "Bus dela Spia". I prepared some material to share in later post, about the work-flow I followed in Blender, MeshLab, CloudComaper and GRASS GIS, but in the meantime I want to show the final result of my work in recovering old documentation (maps and sections), thanks to the FLOSS 3DHOP.

If you are a regular reader of ATOR, you know what I am speaking about. The software is developed by the Italian CNR (ISTI) and, more precisely, by the Visual Computin Lab (the same programmers who write the code of MeshLab). I chose this software due to its nice "slicer" tool, which allow the user to virtually cut a 3D model along one of the axis, to see other models hidden below (of course this is very useful in archaeology). This in not the only interesting tool (especially considering the updates of the last release), but, by now, is the one I want to show, also because I use it very often in another archaeological field: the Forensic Facial Reconstruction (in order to cut the face and show the cranium). Here below is a short video about this tool. Within 3DHOP are loaded 2 object: the Digital Terrain Model of the landscape and the 3D reconstruction of the "Bus dela Spia", performed in Blender. I hope you will enjoy it. Have a nice day!

Speleoarchaeology: recovering old maps in 3D

Hello everybody,

during these days I am working on a speleoarchaeological project regarding a cave called "Bus dela Spia" ("Spy's hole") in Trentino. I already wrote about our first mission in this environment, looking of archaeological evidences. The data I am working on now comes from a new exploration, performed in January 2020.

I will report soon more details about the second mission, but now I would like to share a short video showing the result of a test I did to try to recover some old maps and sections to use them as base cartography for our project, which was focused on the 3D documentation of some specific AOI (Area Of Interest).

Here below is an image showing the old documentation of the "Bus dela Spia", based on past speleological explorations (supported by underwater spelunking activities). As you can see, despite the same scale-bar, the map and the section report different values on the X axis. This is due to the fact that the section does not follow a linear path, since the cave, obviously, is not straight, but, while the 3D path of the of the map has been projected, as usual, on a bi-dimensional plane, the section has been "enrolled", reducing (avoiding?) any projection.

The old documentation (map and section) of the "Bus dela Spia"

To manage this kind of data in an easier way I tried to restore in Blender their original shape in 3D. I will describe this process in future post on ATOR, by now, as I said, I just show the result with the video below.

I will use this raw 3D model to position our 3D documentation of some archaeological evidences, performed via SfM -MVS, trying, in the meantime, to recover some old laserscan data (2009).

I hope this post will be useful, if you will ever have the same problem (in combining map and section of old documentation). I will try to publish more detail about the work-flow ASAP. Have a nice day! 

360-degree video for speleoarchaeological explorations

Hello everybody,

this fast post is to public a preliminary test we performed with a 360-degree video, during the second speleoarchaeological exploration of the natural cave called "Bus dela Spia" (here the report of our first mission).

Personally I think that 360-degree photos and video have good potential to enhance the tourist fruition of "Hidden Cultural and Natural Heritage", granting an accessibility based on VR and WebVR applications to a wider public. 

We will go on in performing new test with this technology (also with better resolution) in "extreme" archaeological contests. I hope we will write some feedback soon, in the meantime, here is the video:

    

Have a nice day!