Travel in Time with Stereoscopy

Hamburg is one of the most painful German cities during World War II. The volume of the destroyed houses was equivalent to the total volume of houses in the cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ludwigshafen, Würzburg and Regensburg. The most powerful explosive ammunition of the time had fallen from the sky. Between May 18, 1940 and April 17, 1945, a total of 213 air strikes took place in Hamburg and a total of 107,000 high-explosive bombs, 3 million fire bombs, and 300,000 phosphorus bombs were fired. After this terrible bombardment, nearly 70 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed.

Detection of Non-Explosive Bombs

No other city in the world has so many aerial photographs taken during the war. Currently there are 30,000 known aerial photographs of Hamburg. With the help of these photographs, non-explosive bombs can be detected. Another advantage was that, unlike Cologne or Berlin, there was hardly any conflict in Hamburg during the war. This shows that the effects of the war come only from air strikes, for example, not a single artillery, completely airborne, the owner of these statements is the head of the Department of Risk and Unexploded Ammunition Research (GEKV) of the Hamburg Fire Department, Thomas Otto.

The “GEKV” section is responsible for categorizing the potential risks of construction sites in the municipal area to the availability of ammunition. The classification is based on the evaluation of historical aerial photographs from both the Allied and German armed forces sources from 1940 to 1946.

Before any construction work in Hamburg, it is essential to check whether the undiscovered bombs are still lying on the planned construction site.

Interpretation of Precision Stereoscopic Aerial Photographs

We start the journey through time with stereoscopy. A stereo monitor with the help of a monitor creates a lively, spatial and 3D platform on the state of the city 70 years ago.

War-time aerial photographs were stereoscopically interpreted on a total of 20 workstations equipped with high-end stereo screens of Schneider Digital’s 3D PluraView “type. This monitor uses the enhanced passive 3D stereo and display technology of the” PLANAR “beam splitter series, which retired years ago. PluraView beam splitter technology provides full screen resolution up to 4K quality with the help of two displays.
The most important part of the study is spatial 3D stereo representation. It allows us to distinguish whether a black dot on the image is a collapse or a height: A collapse can be an indication of a bomb that has entered the ground but has not exploded. Thanks to the detection of such places, sleeping bombs are no longer a threat.

Stereoscopy makes it easy to see if the intermediate floors are in damaged buildings. If there are still intermediate floors, this part of the space is no longer suspicious, but if none of the floors remain, it is certainly suspicious. In addition, it helps analyze photos from different time zones of the same region.

For those who are curious, we wanted to briefly summarize the other features of the product for you …

-“3D PluraView”
-No flicker for continuous professional use
-Maximum brightness – suitable for daylight
-Two body designs: 22 “or 27″ / 28 ”
-Full HD resolution,
-2.5K or 4K per eye
-Approved for photogrammetry and GIS
-Wide viewing angle for multi-user use
-High quality, design and production in Germany

The units are also supplied by Hexagon (Geomedia) and Esri (ArcGIS), Trimble (MatchAT / DTMaster / UASMaster), Erdas (IMAGINE Photogammetie), TerraSolid (TerraStereo), Rhino (SARL RhinoTerrain), PurView (PurVIEW) or Leica (LeicaGeosystems). Approved for all common 3D stereo applications in the fields of photogrammetry and mapping.

The beam splitter technology has been well established on the market since 2005 and the 4K 10-bit version has proven itself as the 3D stereo reference.

For More information www.3d-pluraview.com