11 Jul SF to DC to NY

Monday the 27th of June I was in San Francisco finishing up documenting the Alcatraz Citadel Project, that Wednesday I was back in DC for my 3rd day in the office and on Friday I was in New York. Things are moving fast during this internship and I can’t believe it’s already been a month. The Alcatraz documentation went very well, we were able to complete 100 stations with the scanner and have a highly detailed point cloud. We worked through the weekend and stayed on the island from 7:00 AM to 9PM on some days to finish. I was still able to see some of the city in between this and was able to visit another important San Francisco fort, Fort Point. Fort Point is located at the entrance of the bay underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and is operated by the National Park Service. This fort along with the Alcatraz Citadel Fort in the center of the bay were key in protecting San Francisco. Once we returned to DC we began to sort through all of the data we had and began to clean up the point cloud model. The laser scanner rotates as it scans so it also picked up things that we do not want to have in our final model. I spent the rest of the week removing things that the scanner picked up but we didn’t. This included signs that we had to move before each scan, but we forgot and my jacket I had left in a room. For my holiday weekend I decided to take a trip to New York City to enjoy memorial day out there. I had a great time sightseeing and visiting museums. I visited the High Line, an adaptive reuse project that was led by local groups that wanted to reuse an old elevated rail and convert it into a park. The park today is incredibly vibrant and has been evolving into an amazing user experience that ends at the new Whitney Museum building. After returning to DC HABS was contacted about producing drawings of the insignia at the Korean War Memorial. Apparently one of the letters at the front of the memorial had fallen out and there was difficulty replacing it. We went out early in the morning to begin work on making a photogrammetric model of the insignia in case any other letters needed replacing in the future. This process is done by taking a series of photographs that can be stitched together to make a 3D model. From this model we can then produced precise mesasured drawings that can then be used to manufacture the letters at a mill. This was a great experience and it was great that we were able to work internally with NPS to document a memorial. The process did not take too long and I’m excited to see what will be the end result and how it will be used in the future. This next coming week I am going to be working on stitching together all of the scan data that we had collected at Alcatraz. Afterwards I am going to begin on coloring this data using the photographs that we took for each station and applying it to the cloud. These photographs need to be edited and worked on before they can go in to the point cloud model, so there is plenty of work for the next coming weeks. I am excited to get started on it and eager to see the final outcome, from which we will make 3D video fly-throughs that we will submit to the National Parks Service.  

Colored 3D Point Cloud