While looking online for LIDAR data to visualize, I came across this site. I was immediately fascinated by Disaster City, a training ground for emergency responders in Texas which contains replicas of crashed airplanes, derailed trains and collapsed buildings. I was reminded of Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (one of the best analogies of art-making I have read) and the subject matter seemed perfect for the eerie quality of LIDAR. The fact that the unsettling imagery would actually be of simulated disasters was intriguing too.

Disaster City have hosted a number of robotic training exercises which have yielded large datasets for researchers to download and work with. Dave and I spent a weekend looking at the 4 GB binary logfile, and once we obtained the original scanner calibration file he was able to write a utility to interpret it, to a certain degree (see 1 second of partially decoded data, above.)

But there are always limits to visualizing others’ data, and not just commercial or copyright restrictions. In this case the data was captured by a Velodyne LIDAR scanner, which is a very different instrument from the Leica scanner I used at RPI to make the LIDAR images in the Works on Paper section of my site. While it’s a great device (the Google self-driving cars use a Velodyne, as did Aaron Koblin’s Radiohead video), the resolution wasn’t appropriate for the scale and stillness of the works I want to create. A Velodyne is designed to work in motion, whereas the scans we made with the Leica took 2 1/2 hours and contained millions more points. While I think the idea of remote visualization is fascinating, this is one job I’m going to have to do myself, for full control over the results.

So, it’s time for a trip to Texas. I’m planning to go in April or May and do a range of photographic capture; if I can hire a Leica or similar scanner I will, though with the results I’ve been getting from photogrammetry recently, that would serve as a good approximation if not.

I also think it would be fun to volunteer as a disaster victim for a day… It reminds me of this project by artists Demitrios Kargotis and Dash McDonald. (via WMMNA).