“Point Cloud Cities” was a research that explored the urban fabric of Rome, one of the richest environments of historical inquiry, through contemporary techniques and technologies.  Apart from historical research and on-site observation, digital mapping techniques were applied to visualize the urban space, offering a new perspective to analyse the city and inspiring new design possibilities.

 

During the research, high quality digital video was captured on site and was converted into working virtual models in the studio. Capitalizing on technology pioneered by the film industry, we commandeered the results of this analysis for use as tools of urban representation. During this process, we extract point cloud from the video clips of urban spaces by Boujou Silver Bullet software, a tool typically used for aligning real video with 3D computer generated graphics. The software traces areas of high contrast within each frame of a digital video file to create a three-dimensional point cloud with standard Cartesian geometry. Different types of digital models can then be engendered from the point cloud which is automatically aligned with the objects and facades from the actual spaces originally video recorded on site in Rome.

 

Digital models derived from the processed digital film are then output using computer aided fabrication tools. The resulting models describe the space of the city in new ways and reveal new potentials in contemporary tools for visualization from the virtual to the physical.