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- I'm fairly privileged to say that I have stood on top of Sydney Opera House
and seen that magnificent view up there.
- The first view you get when you come out is of the Harbour Bridge,
the harbour and back then onto the Opera House. It's spectacular.
- The Scottish Ten Project is an initiative from the Scottish government
to digitally preserve Scotland's five World Heritage Sites
and five international Heritage Sites.
This is a once in a lifetime opportunity
to capture the Sydney Opera House and preserve it digitally.
- We wanna be able to take a three-dimensional snapshot in time
that is dimensionally accurate
and put it away, store it.
And the reason for that is that if anything happens to the Opera House,
we have the data as it is today
and we can go back to that data
and we can explain the difference between now
and what's potentially happened.
- UNESCO has recognised the site as an icon of Modernism
and a masterpiece of architecture
and we are very much of that belief, as well,
that this is a fantastic building
and we're very fortunate to have included this
in the Scottish Ten project.
- There was something like 80,000 microfiche or microfilms left
of the building as constructed at the end of the work in 1973.
The issue we've got with those is, we're not sure
they're truly as-constructed drawings and accurate drawings.
- The model will be extremely accurate.
The model will be the most accurate record
of the Sydney Opera House that's ever been produced.
- This building has been a huge challenge to us. It's...
The curves of the shells and the way that certain areas aren't visible
from other parts of the site,
and we've had to develop specially custom-made rigs
to suspend our scanners off of the roofs of the shells
so that we can make sure we collect 100 percent of the data
from around the site.
- The scanner fires out a laser beam
and does this up to 50,000 times a second,
so you get 50,000 points a second.
The scanner calculates the time it takes the light
to hit off a surface and come back. It's then able to work out the distance.
Each point then has an X-Y-Z co-ordinate.
If you get 50,000 of these per second, very quickly it builds up
a very accurate 3D picture of whatever you're scanning.
- The individual scans then get brought into the special software that we use
and I tie the individual pieces together.
So in a day, between the multiple scanners,
we might do 100 scans or 50 scans
and I bring those in and keep building upon the model
as we do the data capture.
If I look at an individual scan,
I can actually come right in
and start to see the individual tiles of the roof.
So that's the kind of level of detail that we're actually capturing.
- What we hope to do with the data,
with the finalised 3D model,
is to be able to take people up there virtually
so that the average person could go up there
and see the view that I saw, see the view of the Harbour Bridge.
That's really important.
- We can turn and look from different angles,
we can do sections and cut-throughs,
we can do animated walk-throughs of the different spaces.
- The Scottish Ten project was set up by our minister in Scotland,
who met the man who invented the laser scanner, Ben Kacyra.
- Ben Kacyra is the founder of CyArk,
Ben and Barbara, actually, are the founders of CyArk.
One day he was sitting watching television
and he saw the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.
And that changed Ben and Barbara's life.
They saw the loss that the world had
in the destruction of that monument
and he decided to put his...
put effort into creating a foundation
that would go around the world documenting heritage sites
to document them and put the dimensional information onto a global ark.
- He then had this vision of capturing 500 World Heritage Sites in five years
because of all the losses,
natural disasters and all sorts of things going on around the world,
and we're losing this cultural heritage.
So we offered to Ben that we would give him
five World Heritage Sites in Scotland.
For every one is Scotland, we will do an international site.
So thus we arrived at this Scottish Ten.
- For me personally, this is a fantastic opportunity
to get so close to such an amazing
and world-famous icon.
- Being here was very, very unique
and it's a rare opportunity.
- For me, it's one of the most iconic buildings of the 20th century.