When three architecture researchers discovered that their London studio was going to be steamrolled – alongside several buildings nearby – to make room for the new High Speed 2 (HS2) railway, they turned to virtual reality. The result, Palimpsest, named after the ancient practice of overwriting parchment manuscripts, recreates the ghosts of neighbourhoods past, using 3D scans of buildings and people to create immersive records of changing cities.
“It’s a historical document,” says John Russell Beaumont, 27, one of Palimpsest’s creators at University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture. With co-creators Takashi Torisu and Haavard Tveito, Beaumont scanned the soon-to-be-inaccessible St James’s Gardens in Euston with LiDAR rigs and used them as a blueprint for a walkable virtual stage peppered with 3D videos of buildings and interviews with residents.
Palimpsest currently only runs on Oculus Rift, but Beaumont intends to adapt it for Tango, Google’s augmented-reality platformthat allows users to 3D-scan environments with their smartphones. “With Tango on their phones, [users can] scan their houses and maybe record a video of themselves talking about their experiences and concerns,” he says.
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Source: Wired