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.

The electronic edge

In this age of instant communication, where all things global come to our desktop in email, I sometimes find one area of interest overlapping with another. I don’t mean in the sense that at new tech innovation profiled on CNET makes the new blast from the Washington Post, but in the more alchemical sense – the mixology of innovation, if you will.

One of the primary sources of this divine confusion is from CNET, as mentioned above. They have many e-blasts and I subscribe to several – News.com Morning dispatch, CNET Security Center, CNET Weekend Hit List. The latest product clips, the newest viral threat, the iWhat and the eHow, the cascade of technological innovation sometimes seems a world beyond control or apprehension, accelerating and self-magnifying in the celebrated Moore’s Law – doubling capacity every 18 months.

The other part of my inspiration is travel news. Sources for this are more varied and less regular. Among their many e-blasts the New York Times has a weekly electronic travel newsletter, spotlighting what’s to be found in the weekend print edition; there are occasional offers from hotel chains and airlines with whom I’ve registered, sometimes unwittingly; river running news from California to Chile (the last in Spanish); and I welcome news from the McAllen Chamber on the latest bird watching news from the Rio Grande Valley, and their fervent opposition to building a border fence (which would prevent wildlife migration as much as “illegal immigrants” – raising the question of why we have borders for people and not birds, or why we have borders at all.)

Is there a place where the two intersect – the travel with the technology? Both are about change. Be it innovation or adaptation, we make do with the hand we’re dealt, either on a river or in the lab; and if we have the skills, we can navigate and improve.

Perhaps the best analogy to the computer conferences of MacWorld or CES is Outdoor Retailer, a bi-annual gathering in Utah for aficionados and businesses in the outdoor world. Gear, apparel, accessories of all sorts are introduced and promoted at the two marketplaces; the Winter Market takes place in January, the Summer Market is just concluding at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. Chances are the first personal GPS location device was introduced here, the first waterproof digital camera, the first inflatable tent.

The show is 25 years old and going strong; the Winter Market had nearly 18,000 attendees. The first convention was held in Las Vegas in 1982, and although the location has changed several times it’s been at home in Salt Lake City since 1996.

They could do a better job at making their web site truly reflect the technical innovations their vendors promise – the default video starts over every time the home page is reloaded, to any surfer’s irritation – and the blogs from the floor leave a lot to be desired. But if you’re in the market for the latest in outdoor gear, wear, or destinations, there’s no better crossroads than the floor of the Salt Palace during Outdoor Retailer.

If you have a favorite e-blast on an adventure topic, let us know by adding a comment below.