De-fragmenting Gandhāran art: advancing analysis through digital imaging and visualization

Students of Gandhāran art are necessarily acutely conscious of the impact of fragmentation upon their field. The very attributes that have drawn scholars to Gandhāra’s visual culture have also, historically, made it vulnerable to patterns of collection that would invite universal condemnation today. Sculpture has been hewn from the structures for which it was originally created, often leaving it without a documented provenance, almost always without a specific archaeological context.2 Not infrequently, sculptural groups have ended up at diverse locations, in different collections, circumstances that present their own challenges for researchers, even where the relationship between dispersed pieces is recognized. This paper considers two approaches that may both help mitigate these difficulties and offer new avenues of research. The first approach addresses the value of object scanning, focusing particularly on issues relating to the high-relief schist sculptures that characterize Gandhāran art. The second uses the remains of Saidu Sharif in Pakistan, an exceptionally well-excavated and documented site, as the basis from which to explore the potential for digital visualization of sites. It argues that the generation of such visualizations, or ‘provocations’, has its own value as an analytical method, testing hypotheses about the interplay of art, architecture, and agency

Understanding the interoperability of virtual city models in assessing the performance of city centre squares

The increasing development of three-dimensional virtual city models and leading-edge computer software applications is providing innovative possibilities for analysing the performance of existing city centre public squares. In the design and assessment of city squares, the use of accurate virtual city models is often limited to visual geometrical assessment only. There is little evidence that such models are being adapted to carry out urban performance simulations. There is however existing and emerging tools that can simulate a number of performance aspects– pedestrian movement, noise level, wind movement and temperature, that show scope for integrating virtual city models to aid in the assessment of public squares. This paper describes a study which investigates the interoperability of “off the shelf” three-dimension al virtual city models to integrate with selected “urban performance” software to contribute to a more integrated approach to the assessment of existing public squares and the future sustainability of virtual city models. Methodologies for utilising virtual city models within “urban performance” software are established, with results demonstrating that the integration of virtual city model data can aid in both the visual and performance assessment of existing public squares, with scope for application to new proposals. The argument is also made that the application of virtual city models in this manner also contributes towards the sustainability of virtual city models, one that takes a more multifunctional approach. This paper acknowledges that the majority of the evaluated software is not related directly to urban design – indeed there is no software currently available that brings together all the performance aspects and relates them to geometrical characteristics. However this study offers a significant contribution to this subject and identifies the need for future research into the evolution of information rich virtual city models

Using laser scanning to produce 3D isovists of real environments

This paper is essentially a technical guide to laser scanning for real-world, two-dimensional isovist creation. The paper covers what is laser scanning, good scanning practice and then describes how to use the resultant data to recreate an isovist directly from noisy, real-world scan data. We will demonstrate how two different isovists can be created: the traditional 2D isovist, and a weighted isovist generated from the surface of a sign, display or shop frontage. This second isovist is weighted by the viewing angle of someone looking at the sign or display. Future areas of research identified from this paper include: work on 3D isovist representations and methods to efficiently process the point cloud data (produced by the scanner) in order to calculate a volumetric isovist; using the colour data, also captured by the scanner, in order to generate potential, colour-based, isovist representations; future work on the placement of signs and displays for optimal efficacy

Three dimensional isovists for the study of public displays

In this paper we suggest that the 3D isovists centered on a display have an impact on the ‘noticeability’ of the information presented on it. We compared the use of 2D and 3D isovists as methods of assessing display ‘noticeability’ applied to an environment in which a network of public digital displays has been installed, namely a university campus. We tested 2D and 3D isovists against observations, and experimental methods are employed in order to compare the observed recognition of display-content against the spatial attributes of the display. This paper introduces new software, ‘Nebula‘, that analyses real world scan isovists’ point clouds using a number of different 3D, volumetric approximations. For the university campus we studied, we found that 3D isovist volume improves the correlation between the recall of display content (when normalized for the number of viewers), over 2D isovist area or other measures. On the basis of this research we recommend the use of both 3D and 2D scanned isovists as a new analytical tool for the study of architectural environments