The University of South Queensland and Ipswich City Council have collaborated to create a 3D model of one of the city’s oldest buildings, the Ipswich Art Gallery. Student surveyors were given the opportunity to use portable scanners for the first time while helping to create a living map of the gallery. According to Associate Professor Zahra Gharineiat, this process offers immeasurable opportunities to capture and share information about a part of the city’s history that has never been captured before. The entire building has been captured as a 3D model for the first time, which will be used later on to build a digital twin.
“We can integrate the gallery with sensors and the digital twin can be used to protect both the building and its art collections,” said Gharineiat. “For example, you can check the temperature and humidity throughout the gallery or foot traffic at each exhibit.” The Ipswich Art Gallery is housed in what was originally known as School of Mechanical Arts, which first opened in 1861.
Lead surveyor and Ipswich City Council spokesman Benjamin Rees said that this collaboration presented an excellent opportunity to capture aging infrastructure that may not have been fully mapped in the past. “We are very excited to investigate new technologies for asset management,” he said. “We’re also really interested in using this data to research and model future design.”
The scan was made possible through NavVis VLX mobile mapping system – something that USQ had never been able to use before. Portable scanners have recently become popular in Australia as they are much more efficient than traditional surveying techniques.
“Using traditional surveying techniques it would take more than a day to map the gallery, but with NavVI it was less than two hours,” said Associate Professor Gharineiat.
What’s more, these mobile scanners are expected to be used for creating digital twins of additional historic buildings and assets in Ipswich as part of future collaborations in the coming months.
This partnership between USQ and Ipswich City Council is a great example of how technology can be used to preserve and protect history while also providing valuable data for future design. According to the article, this collaboration is just the beginning, and we can expect more exciting projects in the future.
