The war in Ukraine and its numerous bombardments. Sievierodonetsk, a key city in the east of the country, is under a deluge of Russian fire. And who says bombardment, says destruction of buildings. Another race “against the clock” is at work in the country to memorize Ukrainian historical buildings.
When shells and missiles rain down on Ukrainian cities, heritage elements are damaged or even destroyed. To Kharkov, for example, of the 500 monuments listed as historic, 100 were hit by bombardments. So to do this, a French engineer, Emmanuel Durand, and his team in Ukraine, model these buildings in three dimensions.
This 3D data acquisition specialist is equipped with a small device that does not look like much. It is fixed on a tripod and it is a very effective scanner. ” It’s a device that measures angles and distances to create what’s called a point cloud, which takes hundreds of thousands of points in space. It’s like a 3D photo of a given scene at a given moment “, he explains.
With his scanner, Emmanuel Durand changes places, goes around the buildings and nothing escapes him. All the data is collected on a computer, and in the end, it is simply three-dimensional puzzle pieces that he puts together.
Freeze scenes for History
The result is extremely precise, since the result is 5 millimeters. The reproduction is easily perfected, the building is virtually rebuilt. You can walk around inside just with your computer, as if you were there, and that’s really useful. It is important to freeze these scenes in time for History and for many other applications. It can then be for criminal analyses, for reconstruction, remodeling, preparing for the future and repairs “, he specifies.
Remodelings of a church, a library, a museum or also the University of Economics of Kharkiv or the fire station of the city, a building built in 1887. This initiative allows people far from the conflict to see almost for true the damage and the richness of Ukrainian heritage. But it is also a relief for the local populations who are reassured not to see all this disappear.
” For me, what is extraordinary with this kind of volunteer mission is that we have people all day long who tell us ‘Thank you for what you do, train people and help‘. It’s an amazing personal experiencebelieves Emmanuel Durand. It brings a bit of another color to all these events of the war where, every day, there are bombs, and of course, victims. With this team, we already bring hope, we are already a bit in the aftermath. And so, we have to freeze all that »
This is not the first time that such a process has been used. Emmanuel Durand notably worked on the port of Beirut, after the dramatic explosion of summer 2020. Other teams have also modeled the ancient sites of Palmyra in Syria, or the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, after the fire of 2019. Technology is simply at the service of memory.