Harnessing Photogrammetry to Create Alternative Views in Heritage

Over the past decade there has been a rise in the use of scanning technologies to record the world we live in. In fact, heritage objects and monuments are being scanned to preserve by record an archive of 3D models, with locations and other metadata. While laser scanning creates a detailed model of the environment it is often time-consuming and requires specialist equipment. In this presentation, I present how we have been using photogrammetry to provide metric surveys of prehistoric monuments. In fact, we utilize the ubiquity of the camera (in the hands of the communities) to photograph heritage artefacts and environments that are uploaded to our server, transformed to 3D models (through an automatic and online photogrammetry server), and stored in open file formats, with metadata. By involving the community we aim to capture data on hundreds Neolithic burial chambers, and standing stones and burial cairns of Bronze Age date. Without the community involvement it would be impossible to capture all these monuments in a timely way. In this talk I will discuss how we have setup the citizen science website, and show how this dataset can be visualized in different ways, such as an online gallery of 2D images and 3D models, maps with locations, and 3D printed objects using a rapid-3d-printer.