Laser Scans May Help To Restore Notre Dame

Modern technology may help to restore Notre Dame after yesterday's terrible fire. National Geographic published an article in 2015 describing how art historians used lasers to create a detailed 3D map of the inside and outside of the cathedral.

Tallon figured out how to knit the laser scans together to make them manageable and beautiful. Each time he makes a scan, he also takes a spherical panoramic photograph from the same spot that captures the same three-dimensional space. He maps that photograph onto the laser-generated dots of the scan; each dot becomes the color of the pixel in that location in the photograph.

As a result, the stunningly realistic panoramic photographs are amazingly accurate. At Notre Dame, he took scans from more than 50 locations in and around the cathedral—collecting more than one billion points of data.

Update: Here's an article that desribes how the architecture of the cathedral could have saved much of the interior.