The Last Refuge of Real Life

Image looking into the past, through the clouds of progress and curtains of vegetation gone wild into a lost civilization at its apex. Then don X-Ray glasses, like a time-traveling Buck Rogers, and peer into the mortar and stone of a building a thousand years old. This is very close to the effect of Ben Kacyra's laser mapping tool found at cyark.org.

As profiled by Tom Abate in the San Francisco Chronicle (see the full story), Kacyra's career has taken him from northern Iraq where he was born in 1940 into the construction industry as a civil engineer. His post-retirement efforts applied his inventive skills to archaelogy; comparisons with Indiana Jones are inevitable, if in appropriate. (One doubts that the fourth IJ movie, currently in production, will feature Harrison Ford as a retired civil engineer.)

CyArk - the name derives from Cyra Technologies, the company Kacyra founded for 3D imaging technologies and later sold to Leica - provides a unique "3D Point Cloud Viewer" that allows the user to move around all sides and even through a holographic-like image of the scanned location.

It could be the grand plaza of the Maya city of Tikal, or the temples of Cambodia's Angkor Wat, or Fort Winfield Scott in San Francisco, or the Cathedral of Beauvais in northern France - dozens of locations are examined from every possible angle with the laser's eye, and exposed in their geometrical glory. See them all on the map, and begin your electroimaging explorations.

Elsewhere on the web, one of the pioneers in soundscape architecture (for lack of a better term) is Bernie Kraus, one of the inventors of the Moog synthesizer, later one of the first to do extensive landscape recording, now one of the first to offer audio recordings on the Web of many destinations as far removed from everyday experience as can be found. Wild Sanctuary is developing an audio plug-in for Google Earth that would allow Web audience to listen to a destination, rather than just see it. (Read the story by Joy Lanzendorfer from the Bohemian, near Krause's Sonoma County home.)

You can download a Wild Sanctuary sound map for Google Earth or FreeEarth that displays locations on a map where audio files are available. Click on a spot -- the Galapagos Islands, the Adirondacks, Timber Lake Alaska or a tropical rainforest in Sumatra, or about 70 other locations -- then put on your headphones, and immerse yourself in a much realer world. Over his 50 year career in sound Kraus has made a huge number of field recordings - 3,500 hours of them; it's an audio documentary of the earth over time. Other audiophiles contribute their own soundscapes to extend Wild Sanctuary's audio archive.

These two innovations (no doubt coincidentally, both from creative men in their "senior years") show that the Web continues to evolve, not just expand. The virtual world is somehow becoming more real, by its incorporation of more sensory information to complement its data.

With the 3D laser view of an ancient structure's skeletal essentials, and a sonically pure immersion in a distant wilderness on the verge of disappearing, the Web is becoming the last refuge of real life. Or life as we knew it, when the planet was still healthy, diverse, and full of promise.