Students build virtual Dartmouth to win contest
A team of Dartmouth students has won Google's Build Your Campus in 3D
Competition. Google asked, "How would your campus look in 3D?," and
challenged students to use Google SketchUp and Google Earth software to find
out. The Dartmouth group was one of seven winning teams chosen from more than
350 entries. The winners will enjoy a trip to Google's headquarters in Mountain
View, Calif., to meet and work with professional 3-D modelers.
Thanks to a team of Dartmouth students, the campus can now be toured in 3-D
from anywhere with Internet access. The students created models of every
building at Dartmouth, which Google Earth displays on top of the satellite
images. (Image courtesy of Google)
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Jessica Glago '08 led the team of students in digitizing and virtually
reconstructing more than 130 buildings that make up the Dartmouth campus. Lorie Loeb, research assistant
professor of computer science, served as faculty advisor. The effort was
sponsored by the Department of
Computer Science and the digital arts
minor, and supported by funding from Dartmouth's William H. Neukom 1964 Institute for
Computational Science. Additional funding came from Borealis Ventures.
Glago confesses that they got off to a slow start. "We had our first meeting
to see who was interested right before spring break in March," she says. "For
most of April we all just kind of sat around a table not knowing where or how
to begin." The deadline for submissions was June 1.
To motivate the group, Glago took more than a thousand pictures of the
buildings on campus from every conceivable angle. "I got a lot of strange looks
from people when I was taking pictures of, say, the back of Robinson Hall from
the stairs of Thayer Dining Hall."
The students used photographs as a guide and Google SketchUp, a 3-D computer modeling
tool. Once they digitally recreated the buildings, they placed them on the
Dartmouth campus using Google Earth, a
mapping program that combines satellite imagery and aerial photographs with 3-D
capability. An elite group of industry professionals from Walt Disney
Imagineering, Electronic Arts, and other architectural and digital design firms
judged the contest.
"Not only am I incredibly proud of this team, I'm very pleased with the
product they created," says Loeb. "People from around the world can now tour
the Dartmouth campus on Google Earth. Visitors can find their way around campus
and locate meeting rooms or other department offices through searchable
keywords."
Stephanie Trudeau '09, a member of the team, remembers thinking it was a
huge undertaking, especially since it was an extracurricular activity that they
did in their free time. "One of the criteria was that you must model your
entire campus, meaning every single building. We had to model everything from
the Boathouse to the Sphinx," says Trudeau. "We had to find the balance between
quality and speed. It's hard to simplify when you know you could make the
buildings so much more elaborate if you were allowed to."
The Dartmouth team went a step beyond the contest's expectations to create
three separate time lines—1800, 1900, and 2007-to illustrate how the campus has
grown and changed. With input from the Office of Planning, Design
& Construction, accompanying material for each building explains when
it was built, what it's used for, who the architect was, and if and when it was
renovated.
Jennifer Huang '09 says that this project was the best part of her spring
term. "Mostly it was because of the awesome group of people that worked on
it."
Gemma Ross '08 agrees, but also acknowledges that sleep was sometimes
sacrificed to get the entry in on time. "The excitement and sense of
achievement everyone was feeling was amazing. Bottom line is that although the
hours put into it grew painful, being a part of this fantastic and fun team
made it all worth it."
Bill Nisen '73 was the alumni representative on the project, providing help
with the research on the origins of the buildings. He sees this achievement as
a sign of good things to come. "Dartmouth is uniquely positioned to use this
project as a catalyst for becoming a center of excellence in 'hypergeography'
... As a society we have moved to a context where location is as easy to tell
as time."
Members of the Dartmouth team are: Ari Bezman '07, Nathan Chung '07, Yasemin
Elci '07, Jessica Glago '08, Daniel Gobaud '10, Jennifer Huang '09, Dave
Heinicke '08, Hari Iyer '09, Samuel Kohn '09,Mandy Lobel '09, Yoon-Ki Park '09,
Gemma Ross '08, Stephanie Trudeau '09, and part-time student Tim Tregubov.
The other winning teams represented Purdue University, Franklin W. Olin
College of Engineering, Concordia University (Loyola Campus), IPFW-Indiana
University Purdue University Fort Wayne, University of Minnesota, and Stanford
University.
By SUSAN KNAPP
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