[Music playing in background]
The Eastern Qing Tombs or Qing Dong Ling as they are known here are the resting place of the last emperors of China,
And we will be working over the next four weeks,
To document the Xiao Ling Tombs and the Jing Ling Tombs.
These are two of the fifteen tombs which are on this site.
The Scottish Ten Project is a five year initiative
To laser scan and digitally preserve Scotland's five world heritage sites
And also five international heritage sites working with partners around the world,
To digitally preserve their monuments for future generations.
The Scottish Ten Project is a collaboration between many different organisations.
There is ourselves at Historic Scotland; there is the Digital Design Studio of Glasgow School of Art; and there is CyArk Foundation who are a foundation set up to digitally preserve the world's heritage.
We are also working very closely here with the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the Cultural Relics Department at the Eastern Qing Tombs, and the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage.
So this site fits perfectly with the CyArk mission,
Our mission is to collect important sites from human history, and our collective human history
And this site is more than spectacular in its size, its scope, and its details, so in the fact that it is maybe not as well known to public,
In terms of China, most people may think of the Great Wall, or the Terracotta Warriors, and this is something that deserves to have same sort of recognition purely for its architectural mastery.
I am Alastair Rawlinson; I am a visualisation specialist for the Digital Design Studio of Glasgow School of Art.
On these projects, I involved in planning out and managing the onsite work,
So this is planning out where we scan, how we are going to adapt our methodology to fit the site,
Taking in account all of the different aspects of the site, and managing people and managing equipment, to allow us to effectively capture everything that we can.
So we are actually using two different terrestrial laser scan systems onsite.
One is the time of flight machine which basically sends out tens thousands of pulses of laser light every second.
The laser light hits objects and bounces back; the machine then records how long that light took to come back to the machine and then therefore to determine its distance and sets a point at that distance.
At the end of the day, the laser starts to create its own laser light show onsite.
In the bright sunlight, it's a little overpowering and we tend not to see the light.
But definitely in the dusk and evening we typically scan usually past sunset in order to capture this vast area,
We can start to see the laser light particularly the time of flight in the nice bright green laser.
One of the main aims of the Scottish Ten project is digital preservation, so we want to have an accurate 3D record of these sites.
I am standing here next to a giant fire urn, which was used to contain water to put any fire that might come up at the tomb behind me.
So fire is a real risk to world heritage sites, and here at the Eastern Qing Tombs, many of the structures have been struck by lightning and have been the victim of fire over the years.
So it is very important we have an accurate digital record of these so they can be used for the rebuilding of any of the site should this happen to them.
Once the digital model had been completed, we are hoping that will be used to raise awareness of the site, also be used as a planning and management tool for the conservation of the site.
We are hoping really that all will bring this site a much larger audience we can develop interpretation material, put content online and really boost the profile of the site.
Over last few days, we are joining onsite by Topcon China, who have helped us out with the survey using their mobile mapping system.
This is been a great addition to the project and a first for Scottish Ten project,
So we been using both a tricycle mounting system and a car mounting system to tie together the individual structures at the Xiao Ling and Jing Ling tombs.
And we will later on combine this data from Topcon scanners with our own terrestrial scan data to create one over all point cloud of the entire site.
So the vision of Scottish Ten with the collaboration of Glasgow School of Art, CyArk, and Scottish Government, Historic Scotland, is really quite phenomenal,
And it is managed to pull together so many people from you know commercial industries, then universities then heritage groups then international leaders,
And really sort of prove that our heritage is something important, it is valuable to each us locally and of course we want to share promote that internationally so we are really able to provide goodwill project for the rest of the world.