3D from 2D

Thanks to David Connolly at www.bajr.org, we've recently learnt about 123D Catch, a free beta software package that creates 3d models from photos taken at different angles. This software is a lot of fun to use, and we've spent the last day or so playing around with some images from our archive. Happily enough, the way we often photograph sites - spiralling around them in a helicopter - produces photos that are almost ideal source material for this software, and some of the early results of are pretty impressive, especially as we didn't have this technology in mind when we took the photos (see above: Khirbat Iskandar, an Early Bronze Age site on the King' s Highway in Jordan)! We are exploring this tool as a means of displaying detailed information about the sites we photograph to the public, as well as using the models as a research tool - they often reveal nuances of topography that we simply can't see from air (we found out that Burqu Kite 7 sits in a low valley that likely funelled animals into the Kite's head, for example). We'll be posting more of these fly-overs as we make them!