THE next Bond villain's lair? An alien spaceship lying dormant under an unsuspecting city?
This 3D scan of an underground structure is actually of something much more familiar: a postal service. The Mail Rail network shuttled mail around London for 76 years (see photo below) until being decommissioned in 2003. Now it has been frozen in time. This aerial view of the network is below a sorting station soon to be home to a postal museum – the loop of track will be a train ride whizzing visitors through a kilometre of tunnels.
The segment of the world's first driverless, electrified railway has remained untouched since the site shut down, strewn with personal items left behind by workers including dartboards, tools and calendars.
But since the site will be cleaned up before it opens to the public in 2016, digital scans will be the only record of its days as a working piece of infrastructure. To create the image, capturing details as small as 2 milimetres across, a camera-like device on a tripod emits a laser that bounces off objects in its path 250,000 times a second. The scanner needs to capture about four different perspectives to recreate a site, in a process that takes less than 30 minutes.
The 3D reconstructions could be used in an augmented reality app, allowing museum visitors to view original details of the site with a smartphone while strolling around.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Loco emotive"
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