Bentley Systems has announced that its Bentley Pointools Visualization Technology (BPVT) was used to visualize and analyze the most detailed laser scan of historic Stonehenge.
The laser scan with point spacing of 0.5 millimeters resulted in an enormous data resource of 850 gigabytes. The use of Bentley Pointools on this project enabled large datasets to be loaded, facilitating an examination of the full resolution data. The discovery of the carvings at Stonehenge was realized through the team’s use of Bentley Pointools’ Plane Shading function to create a grey scale band 7.5 centimeters wide.
Richard Zambuni, Bentley’s Global Marketing Director, Geospatial and Utilities, said, “The powerful layering and shading functions in Bentley Pointools allowed carvings of Bronze Age axe heads and daggers that were invisible to the naked eye to be visualized and provided sub-millimeter accuracy to the archaeologists documenting Europe’s greatest Stone Age building.
This extremely challenging survey of Stonehenge provided further evidence of this advanced software’s ability to make sense of gigabytes of dense, complex point-cloud information and accomplish highly flexible point-cloud visualizations. Without question, Bentley Pointools has a vital role to play in projects in the heritage, security, and forensics markets as well as in Bentley’s home territory of sustaining modern-day infrastructure.”
It was only through Bentley Pointools’ powerful visualization capabilities that this eroded prehistoric artwork was discovered.
