It’s no secret that our 3D Laser Scanning and Industrial Measurement Department does exciting work. Our specialty scanning services provide the opportunity for travel, both domestically and abroad. A frequent location is the Kingdom of Bahrain, where a recent trip included an excursion to the Qal’at al-Bahrain. The Qal’at al-Bahrain, also known as the Bahrain Fort, is a culturally rich archeological site located 5.5 km West of Bahrain’s capital, Manama. The site represents over 4,500 years of life, dating all the way back to 2300 BC.*

Scan point cloud with elevations

As a volunteer effort and personal hobby, Jerry Dawson, Senior Survey Technician for our IMD Department, uses his trips to Bahrain as an opportunity to capture scans from the Bahrain Fort. A huge benefit to scanning is its lack of disruption, which is important to help preserve and capture historical sites. He uses scan data and a 3D mesh model to create a ‘fly through’ video that allows viewers to see the interior of a location from a 360 perspective. The Bahrain Fort video included 40 individual scans and covered only 1/8 of the entire fort (it’s huge)! To make things even more interesting, the Bahrain temperatures reached 120 degrees that day, but the scanners can only withstand up to 100 degrees. In a true dedicated fashion, Jerry had to hold a towel above his head to cast a shadow onto the equipment to complete the two hour scanning process. The final fly-through video will look very similar to the images below.

3D mesh models

*All information for Qal’at al-Bahrian is taken from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Centre: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1192