By Rachel Tiffen
There's a long road ahead re-building Christchurch but new technology has been brought in to help.
The MX8 mobile spatial unit creates images like Google’s Street View, but with stone-by-stone definition, it's been used for roading development overseas but never to rebuild after a natural disaster.
It looks like something from back to the future and that's exactly what the MX8 is doing, helping bring Christchurch back.
Street by street, it's creating a high-definition, 3D model of the shattered city.
“In the map there will be a 3D map with all the detail like all the structure, collapses the road with great precision,” says Trimble field support technician Nicholas Blanchett.
Driving at normal traffic speed, mapping and scanning roads, buildings and bridges. Images of the red zone are created with scanners, cameras and on onboard computer. In an image of Cashel Street, different colours used by different scanners make definition even clearer.
The MX8 mapped out the red zone in just one day and is now making its way through Christchurch's worst affected suburbs.
The after shots are compared with aerial maps and ground scans taken before the September and February quakes.
“It will help developers in the future to extract information out of that model and add into that model in a 3D design modelling system,” says Geosystems business development manager Martin Hewitt.
So, just like the movie, Christchurch can go back to the future.
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