Virtual Dartmoor: Laser Scanning a Devon Farmhouse | Time Team

[Music] [Music] welcome to dartmoor a remote and vast area of moorland in the county of devon in south west britain dartmoor national park covers an area of 954 square kilometers making it about the same size as 20 000 football pitches it's famous for rugged landscapes giant granite tours windswept moors dartmoor ponies picturesque villages and is steeped in myths and legends people have been living and working on dartmoor for thousands of years and have shaped this ancient landscape over time the mowers are scattered with prehistoric hot circles and enigmatic stone circles and stone rows in fact dartmoor is one of the most important archaeological landscapes in britain hi i'm danny wootton time teams fines specialist and community archaeologist i'm here on dartmoor today to visit a 700 year old farmhouse called hire uppercut and i'm going to be finding out about an amazing collaborative project between plymouth university academics and students and dartmoor national park using cutting edge technology they're going to be scanning higher uppercut and actually using that data and turning it into a game so that this remote farmhouse here on dartmoor can be viewed all around the world making it much more accessible for everyone to enjoy what a fantastic project let's find out more about it throughout the year in between the main dig episodes we'll be dropping in on interesting projects like this one here in devon no you might be wondering what gaming or virtual reality have to do with archaeology in fact many parallels can be drawn between game development and the modern tools and techniques used by archaeologists this might include collecting data recording fines and features mapping topography and reconstructing the past digital scanning is an increasingly useful tool to record archaeological features and to be able to virtually examine them remotely and without further disturbance what's more on time team we're big supporters of the value of experimental archaeology experimental archaeology uses traditional tools and methods to recreate items such as clothing metal work flink tools or even processes such as cooking or building an iron age roadhouse to get a better understanding of their function and how they were originally made and a similar process can also be applied to the virtual world for example attempting to accurately reconstruct a historic building might present challenges and questions that weren't necessarily apparent from the archaeology alone oh guys this all looks a bit technical can you tell me what's happening here yeah so at the moment we're using a laser scanner to project out and measure the space around us so that we can then generate a 3d model for that and put it into a game engine amazing so chris can you explain a little bit about lidar so basically the lidar scanner fires a load of lasers into the space wherever we've got it set up rotates around and as it you know kind of fires the lasers off it's measuring the time and distance that laser takes to hit a wall and come back to the device that then gives us a very accurate reading of the space we can take that data put it into some digital offering software and make a game environment based around the you know kind of scan that we've given it fantastic so you just use the phrase game environment what does that mean so game environment is essentially where a game will take place it's you know it has the narrative it has all of the you know kind of assets all of the things that you would expect to see playing a game of a particular context um so the environment you know is is where the game sort of takes place so people the game will happen people will be able to sort of feel immersed in the game as if they're in the ship and here yeah so they'll have the ability to walk around this space as a 3d environment so they can get up close to the walls to the space and really understand what it's like currently and how it was before so how are the students involved in this project so with this project they're taking the research that was built on from the ma heritage course at plymouth university and they're using that research to then build a interactive narrative experience um using this environment as the basis brilliant well i think i've taken up enough of your time it's really important that we get this all scanned today isn't it so i'm going to leave you to it this is really exciting so nice to chat to you i'll see you in a bit cheers james what on earth are you doing so at the moment i'm scanning this building in order to make it much easier for us to put it into a video game type experience okay so what does this contraption do then so what this does is scan the actual building pretty much down to the millimeter saves us and the students as well doing the hard work and kind of manually doing it creating it in a 3d model or even just taking it from reference photos by scanning this what's that going to look like in terms of the end result of the game i mean end result hopefully pretty much photorealistic wow how is this game going to work the person playing it will be able to explore kind of freely and kind of look right up to the whatever kind of catches their interests but also learn about the importance of the building and the history of it as well wow so can you tell us a bit about this equipment then yeah so um this is a 3d scanner there many different types and thankfully they come down a lot in size they are still hideously expensive so we're very fortunate to be able to hold it that one kind of cradling this at the moment it's worth a lot um but the good thing with the particular unit is it got a screen in it as well so it makes my job a lot easier i haven't had that much training on it but it doesn't take too long for you to kind of pick up and get an idea to know what you're doing and but importantly get the data that we need from it and then what happens once you've got this data here so then once we have that we're able to put it into the computer and then put it into the video game engine that we're using and then kind of manipulate it where necessary but hopefully if the date is good enough the amount of work that will take will be a lot less than it would have been in the past and this is all going to be done by the students yes in your department which is so um we're the idek department at the university of plymouth and so what's going to happen to the game is it going to be released how are people going to be able to find out about it so we're working with dartmouth park authority so i believe the aim is to try and get it into the hands of of the public because really we want more people to know about what is here both for those in the uk those who live locally maybe even internationally i think that's a really fantastic way to get people involved isn't it and particularly those who aren't able to visit this place for themselves exactly i mean that's the other thing with down and covered showing that we can't always travel as much as we want to and again the beauty of this is it means more people can see this but also it helps to preserve this area as well you don't necessarily want everyone trampling around on it so it helps it last even longer well you've got an important job to do today so i'll let you get on with it and i'm just going to watch you go on then you better crack on yeah plenty to do oh martina what are you doing uh so i'm currently taking pictures of the wood the witch marks that people from dartmoor believed in to protect them from like evil spirits and stuff so i would love to like add this in into the game to like show off how superstitious they were with like little bits around the property so yeah this is a wonderful little detail isn't it this was caused by holding lit candles at 45 degree angle for quite a while and then you get this effect here you can just well you can almost see the candle flame there can't you where is burned in and and the idea was that bizarrely that it was meant to protect against fire and actually you can well imagine in a wooden timber frame building that you'd be very well aware that it might catch fire so you would do everything that you could to ensure it was protected so what a wonderful detail okay well i shall let you get on with it thanks very much well that was brilliant wasn't it i just loved catching up with everyone finding out about that project it was wonderful to meet the students and the staff from plymouth university to see how they're using this cutting-edge technology and turning it into a game i can't wait to play it i hope you enjoyed that we'll be following the progress of the project here at higher uppercut over the coming weeks both on the time team official youtube channel and on patreon you might recall the time team excavation at tottyford on dartmoor our 200th episode where we excavated a recently revealed stone circle amongst other prehistoric features and incidentally we're not a million miles away about 40 to be precise from the wolf valley no roadford reservoir where the programme time signs was filmed the precursor to time team where tim taylor and archaeologists mick aston and phil harding made their debut coming soon i'll be taking a tour of higher uppercut with historic buildings expert and talented draftsman dr richard parker you might remember richard from our recent cottage core piece and we look forward to sharing his unique insights with you [Music] to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Official

Views: 24,357

Keywords: Time team, Archaeology, History, Tim Taylor, Channel 4, Archaeological, Archaeological site, Digging, Digs, UK Archaeology, Archeology, archeology site, Phil Harding, Mick Aston, Tony Robinson, TimeTeam, Time Team Official

Id: z7pfGWQOwCk

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022