Preserving the past in three dimensions

UC Merced Professor Nicola Lercari is leading an effort to preserve, through 3-D renderings, the deteriorating ghost town of Bodie.

Thanks to $60,000 in seed funding from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, Lercari and his team will be continuing and expanding the project for another year.

Some of the buildings in Bodie, once a thriving mining town near the California-Nevada border, have been carefully preserved for visitors to the Bodie State Historic Park. The rest, exposed to the elements for more than 130 years, are in danger of being lost forever due to decay or wildfire.

Using drones, airborne laser-scanning technology, digital sensors and photography, Lercari and his team are recreating Bodie in three dimensions. From individual artifacts to the park’s topography, archaeologists are working alongside land surveyors and drone operators to capture a level of detail that was previously unimaginable.

Park officials plan to make the interactive digital renderings available in the Bodie visitor center, and an augmented reality app and web app for visitors will bring the town to life for scientists and the public worldwide. (For a video story about the project, visit http://bit.ly/1q9UTyh.)

UC Merced’s new Classroom and Office Building 2 will include additional lab space and a massive, semicircular display made up of 20 55-inch screens that will enable visitors, students and researchers to virtually travel through cultural heritage sites and inspect ancient artifacts.

The researchers also will explore ways to educate the public about Bodie using the renderings in mobile apps and online games, and to encourage public interaction both at the park and remotely through social media.

“These technologies have the capacity to call public attention to critical social issues and build constituencies,” Lercari said. “Aligning with the CITRIS Connected Communities Initiative, this project leverages a combination of mobile app technologies, augmented reality and social media to promote collaborative governance and public engagement in Bodie’s preservation.”

Lercari, a world heritage professor in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, has partnered with UC Merced’s Mechatronics, Embedded Systems and Automation Lab on the project.

This story was originally published April 22, 2016 at 2:51 PM with the headline "Preserving the past in three dimensions."