Tour African Monuments Online

Cherita Chen writes "Heinz Ruther, professor of Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, looks to provide a "Virtual tour of Africa's heritage". http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4507454.st m "Africans will soon be able to take an online tour of the continent's major world heritage sites like Great Zimbabwe, the rock-hewn St Giyorgis church at Lalibella in Ethiopia and the great mosque of Djenne in Mali.""

Geomatics?

[rossdee]

Main Entry: geomatics
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: a science concerned with using mathematical methods on data about the earth's surface
Usage: science

kill the angle.

[quest(answer)ion]

this story would be fairly interesting if not for the shoddy "how can we get people interested?" approach. shame on you, /. for picking up on the damn tourism angle.

for example, from TFA:
                "It's going to be a scholarly database - it won't just be pretty pictures," he said.

well, i would damn well hope so. the aim here isn't tourism. this stuff isn't going to be used primarily for a 3D tour at visitmali.com. the digital imaging being done at these sites is rescue archaeological work, aimed at preserving these bits of history for future generations of students and scholars far into the future.

granted, some of the money now going to laser scanning and photogrammetry might be better used shoring up the preservation funding the article takes care to mention is lacking, letting these monuments disintegrate, but preserving them in replicable digital form will make them accessible to people who might want to study these works long after they've crumbled or been bombed into dust.

A good use of 1st person shooter engines

[bhima]

For a while now I have thought that an interesting and effective way to teach children about history and archeology would be to digitize prominent ancient archeological sites and let them interact with the sites using a modified game engine... Finally a use for Quake or Doom!

why go there at all if you can watch it on TV?

[Mantorp]

Not sure the pyramids would be very impressive on my 19 inch screen, but I'm not sure I'd drag my family there given the region's political climate either.

Re:why go there at all if you can watch it on TV?

[frenetic_wimp]

Sadly, the pyramids are not all that impressive up close either. Granted, the structures themselves are prett awe-inspiring, but the surrounding area killed a lot of the experience for me. I didn't mind the state of the residential areas around Giza, as they are representative of average housing in Cairo, but the amount of debris and junk in the undeveloped desert immediately surrounding the pyramids themselves is quite disgusting. I saw several rotting carcasses of horses and donkeys among plastic wrappers

geat idea...

[dwbassett42]

I personally think this is great, because now I and many other people will get to see places of great wonder and beauty that we would never be able to see otherwise.

I will never travel there to see any of them, because going there would violate one of the first rules of safe international travel for Americans: Never go anywhere on the entire continent of Africa. This rule is only second to an even more important rule: Never travel to a country whose name ends in -stan.

Egyptian Pyramid Tour Starts Here!

[Darius Jedburgh]

Just in case the site gets slashdotted you can take a digital tour of a pyramid right here:

1. (-1,-1, 0)
2. (-1, 1, 0)
3. ( 1, 1, 0)
4. ( 1,-1, 0)
5. ( 0, 0, 1)

Science or religion?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Great Zimbabwe, the rock-hewn St Giyorgis church at Lalibella in Ethiopia and the great mosque of Djenne in Mali.""

I sure hope it includes some other sites- given how American politics has infected science lately, this whole datatabase could be criticized for being more religious than scientific.....

Two suggestions

[DaoudaW]

First, the models shown in TFA are way too shiny. Please get it right, dry mud is not shiny!

Second, World Wind. Don't reinvent the wheel. World Wind is the perfect browser for this type of information.