Supporters:
Inspired by both the success of theMarieAgnesProject.com and hearing Mikko Paasi's compelling story about navigation struggles during the Thai cave rescue, we decided to come up with our first large-scale 3d underwater mapping project.
Maria Concordia, an old, flooded Magnesite mine with its irregular corridors, beautiful magnesite veins and crystal clear water seemed to be the perfect site to conduct the survey. Our goal is to create a complete photogrammetry scan of all 4 corridor levels, along with the 40m deep shaft.
Thanks to tens of hours spent underwater and months of precise work on the 3d model, every diver visiting Maria Concordia will have access to an accurate 3d depiction of the mine. This will not only increase safety and make it easy to plan the dives, but will also allow non-cave divers to experience the beauty of the mine, using Virtual Reality technology.
A project of this size required quite a bit of thorough planning. Getting our international team of 6 in one place and at a specified time was a challenge of itself. We also needed some extra equipment, for instance a considerable amount of high end video lights, extra GoPros and a crazy amount of batteries, chargers and memory cards. Some of the equipment was kindly provided by Xdeep Exploration Support Program and Orca Torch Poland and some (including GoPros) needed to be rented commercially.
To create an accurate scan we constructed a custom for 4 strong video lights and 5 cameras shooting simultaneously.
So far our team conducted 9 dives, meticulously gathering photo data of the corridors, meter after meter. There is no shortcut way here - photogrammetry does not forgive sloppiness.
Today, being far from completion, the project consists of around 150.000 photos. Aligning and reconstructing this amount of data in photogrammetry software takes hundreds of hours and tens of hours of manual corrections and amendments.
Working with such amount of data, it does not make sense to simply publish a 3d model online. It would either need to be oversimplified to be displayed in the browser, or super heavy and only few individuals with strong work stations would be able to open it. Therefore we decided to work on a set of visualisations, cross sections, maps, animations and VR experiences to make sure everyone can take a deep dive into the beauty of Maria Concordia mine.
