Road Engineering Project

Creative Director and Co-Principal Investigator
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Blacksburg, VA, 2014
Funded by an Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) SEAD (Science, Engineering, Art, and Design) Grant
~Awarded tenure in spring, 2016

The Road Engineering Project merged a recently acquired 3D image-based reconstruction platform from the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department with the virtual reality and rendering capabilities from the School of Visual Arts.

The project goals were (1) to assemble and test a mobile bridge deck surveyor platform that can, in two hours or less, automatically map and measure cracks on a bridge carrying Rt. 15 over the James River in Virginia, and (2) to create a 3D image-based reconstruction and mesh models of the cracked bridge deck, automatically measure crack widths, and compare these measurements to the manual survey.

My role as creative director was to 3D scan the bridge and then compare data sets between the Lidar data and the data created by the 3D image-based reconstruction platform.

Collaborators: Dr. Gerardo Flintsch (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech) and Dr. Cristopher D. Moen, (Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech)