3D models of Coventry

I don't know for sure what the guy meant but at a guess he'd run two separate things together in one sentence. So Charles Dickens performed on stage at one point in time. Years later you could, if you were very wealthy (and there were a few) listen on the phone to whatever was being performed, not Charles Dickens himself. Like many gimmicks it failed to take off. Would I like the reconstructions to be as close to real as possible. Of course. However to get the kind of expertise you need to either be a team of experts in 3D and archaeology and Architecture and Coventry. Or you need to pore through books and books and books, spend years building and correcting as a new snippet of information comes out. And it's still largely speculation. If you compare it to Time Team models of various buildings, it's not bad, and they did have the experts. Many of Pete's other buildings are excellent and his street views are coming along a treat. As far as I know the guy is doing it in his spare time. There are things that immediately stuck out to me as wrong but then I've spent a lot of money and read (or looked at the pictures in) a lot of books. One professional company at least has had a go at recreating St Mary's and it didn't look a lot more convincing. I don't see a lot of videos springing up with competing versions. I'm basing my historical model after the Civil War because any point closer to now would see the wall come down. Any older and things we'd want to see start to vanish - eg Bridgeman's, The Lychgate Cottages, the Grapes on Warwick Lane. Things get more and more guesswork the further back you go. The further forward and the more buildings there are to draw. That doesn't stop me speculating that St Mary's had an octagonal tower. Working out what the city looked like isn't even easy when you have many images and the real thing still there to be studied. Did you know that the windows on the north and south sides at the east end of St Michael's were originally all the same design? Far easier to copy the ones there in Kaga's day than work out what they looked like a few hundred years earlier. Too much detail in a 3D model and even a mainframe computer struggles to process everything. A single frame on a Pixar movie takes a day or more for the computer to work out the image that flicks past your eyes in fractions of a second. That's not the months and years of designers building the 3D characters and scenery and programming how they'll move, it's just the single final frame. The one thing they tell you about getting into 3D is NOT to try an build a massive city with loads of ultra complex buildings. Excellent advice. Did we listen to common sense? So instead of being disappointed, how about pointing out what could be improved to make it more accurate?

I believe Dickens was an early adopter of the "Dicktafone" - I'm sure I saw one on Bargain Hunt.

And 'What the Dickens?' is a Shakespeare quote... actually that one's true There is a need for experts in history and archaeology to get together with 3D designers. About once a year we get someone who wants to rebuild Coventry but doesn't know the research. The researchers know the city but they can't necessarily learn the 3D skills. The trouble is they are (rightly) sceptical of the enthusiasm of the 3D builders. To get help, you first need to prove yourself worthy of their time.

Peter's work is something I dreamed about doing ages ago but without the talent. I think it should be accessible within The Herbert. It's so difficult for anyone of a certain generation to appreciate what Old Cov was like. The amount of comments I get from responding to FB posts or on something seen on here where people cannot believe it's the same city.

"At Ninety-three" It was long ago and far away A Coventry unlike today Where streets were narrow and traffic free And there was no 3D technology

3Spires, I have long been an admirer of new technology. Only last night on Channel 5 I watched 3D of the great pyramid, the sphinx, and a 90m well in Cairo, and was amazed - brill, right up my street for I stood on the very spot they assembled their equipment last night, some 74 years ago, full of questions that they answered last night. I wonder if you saw it? I also watch the 'Drain the oceans' programme, they also have answered questions from the same years. 28 out of 29 tanks went to the bottom of the channel on D-Day that should have landed on Omaha Beach. I would say I get a bigger kick out of the new technology than you youngsters. But thanks for your little 'ditty'

It was on BBC 4 if we're thinking of the same programme Kaga Invisible Cities - Cairo This is about the third series. Lidar is amazing. What they're uncovering all over the planet is ground breaking but without shovels. In South America, they're stripping back the trees to see vast cities, cultivation areas, even city walls that rival Coventry's. Some of Spon Street has been done and they're hoping to use it to recreate the original Street, complete with smellovision. Not sure about that bit.

Hi Kaga No, unfortunately I missed the programme but I do remember seeing the Naples, Venice and Florence episodes, in the Invisible Cities series as mentioned by Helen above. I'm so glad you liked my little 'ditty' and I hope you'll forgive my taking a liberty with the title - Many thanks

Helen, 3spires, I dislike soaps, and modern stuff. The programme on thursday night followed the Tutankhamuns full of cutting edge technology and history, (can't believe I once went to Las Vegas to combine gambling with the new Pyramid Hotel and replica of Carter's tomb down in the basement). Their next programme is 3D in Istanbul. I watched Andrew Marr's history of painters also, been to the Louvre too. After the war there was a great mix-up paintings that had my interest, explored those three cities above, they cost nothing for entry in the fifties, and a fiver got you a three months rail-on-off ticket, the world was my oyster in the day. Now the telly takes me back to relive those long gone days. Most of those cities, built new on one-side of the old, so they now have both, Coventry made a big mistake to my thinking. PS, yes it was invisible cities.

Helen, About Coventry Rebuilt. I still cannot see how a make believe model that is nothing like the real thing is of any use to anyone, no matter how clever someone maybe. If the Rex cinema played the film Sanders of the river, then the model is wrong, no one would recognize Butcher Row without being told, and would someone give me an idea of the buildings of 1942, picture please?

Kaga, you're quite correct, the creation of a 3D model of a historic location cannot recreate the atmosphere of being there, though that is not the aim, well not yet at least. The model lacks a number of attributes: colour, movement, sound and smell. Colour. It was not until my father's generation that colour images became possible in books, photographs, magazines films and television. Prior to that the only way to record the colour of anything was to paint a picture of it and hence we have to rely on the artist's accuracy. We now take for granted the little device we can hold in one hand that can not only record colour images but can access just about any colour image that has ever been created. That same device is quite capable of taking a monochrome picture of a long deceased relative and turning it into a realistic looking colour image. colourise.sg Movement. It was probably my grandfather's generation that first experienced the marvel of recorded moving images, the movies. A 3D model lacks all but the simplest actions, pan, zoom, reposition, as did the first movies. To include any real action in a model it's necessary to develop the next level, what is now called virtual reality or just VR. Peter's aim is to develop his model into somthing that can be used on that little hand-held device. His Coventry Rebuilt app is the start, offering the basic pan, zoom and reposition. For true VR, we probably have to wait for the next generation of technology. You may note that Peter's site also demonstrates how those colourised images of your relatives can be given simulated life simply by having them blink at a suitable interval. www.coventryrebuilt.com Sound. The recording of sound was developed in the same era as the recording of moving images. But the survival of any recording of a commonplace street scene must be rare. For example I don't know of any recording of a Coventry tram. Of course you only need a couple of half coconuts to make a perfectly plausible rendition of a horse trotting on cobble stones. Smell. I doubt that anyone will ever deem it worthwhile to develop a way to record smells, and 'play' them back. It's not too far-fetched to envisage a VR headset that allows you to traverse the colourised old streets of Coventry, listen to the sound effects of a busy street, watch simulated people going about their business. Even the timing of trams is known from surviving old timetables; the occupants of houses are known from century old censuses, their names, ages, occupations. Perhaps you could even knock on a door and have the residents come out and introduce themselves. It has taken less than 20 years for the technology for 3D modelling to become practical for amateur enthusiasts, the next 20 will no doubt see similar advances that seem like science fiction today. No it won't look real, but hopefully enjoyable to try out. Peter, apologies for using your image of the lady blinking. I hope you don't mind.

Hi Kaga mcsporran has answered a lot of the reason why Pete's models aren't perfect but I'll add a bit more. The stuff on the Invisible Cities is realistic (if ghost like) because they are scanning existing buildings and landscape. They record colours as well as shapes. They use very expensive equipment to scan and then make sense of the data. They can't use the same technology to rebuild things. Pete is using different software to recreate things from scratch. It's software similar to that used to design computer games, some of which are realistic but most aren't. While there are photos and in some cases plans of Coventry's buildings, how do you recreate a whole building, let alone a street using a fraction of the data? Even with a good map to build onto, how do you work out how tall a building was? What did the roof look like, what was the back or the interior like? What was even the slope of the street? There is publicly available data for Coventry but it's modern (the city has changed a lot), it's hard to convert to a useful form and it is only accurate to 1m (0.25m if you pay big money) which can hide a lot of detail. You can get tied up in details like guttering or door furniture. Colour adds another dimension of difficulty and as I said, it demands more computer power. It also requires a source of realistic images of stone, brick, wood and plaster etc. The sorts of reconstructions that look very realistic are created by large teams, including experts in the buildings. Pete is just one man who has to travel miles to extract anything special from the Herbert (and has to work out what to order in advance). This isn't even a paid job. Personally I wouldn't have attempted St Mary's because there just isn't enough information yet but a flawed recreation will attract more public interest than a rebuild of Cook Street. It's a logical extension of his Broadgate and Butcher Row. He's coming up with similar problems to me, when trying to build the outer streets. Too many parts are missing or hard to find. It's taken me years to tease out just a front image of most buildings. Pete has got on and built and done a good job. Both methods have merit. The reason for praise is that it's a very difficult job and so far nobody else has come close to anything as good.

Continued. One of the reasons that computer games look fake is because they don't use irregularity right. They either exaggerate and have impossible architecture or make everything look too regular. There are sharp edges and 90 degree angles. Many early computer games used a lot of repeated pictures to cover a surface (eg a stone wall) but our eyes spot the repeats and cry 'fake'. To create something that fools the eye requires a lot of extra work for the computer and modeller. It's even harder to recreate something real because they eye can pick up the differences with true.

I think that's why only very costly CGI 'works'. The cheap stuff doesn't work because your brain has already calculated where the action/scene should be going, and when it doesn't, as Helen says above, your brain screams 'fake. I guess it's acceptable for the Marvel 'superhero' generation.

Helen. Where can we view your re-creations?