If you didn’t manage to catch PBS this week and the first airing of D-Day 360 you have to make sure you find the time to see this amazing film. The show walks you through the incredible events of D Day and uses technology (think LiDAR and laser scanning) to recreate, in amazing details, the allied forces landing on Omaha Beach – it really is an incredible story and great use of technology to preserve this sad yet life changing day in history.
This from undertheradar… The program’s computer recreations allow the filmmakers to zoom in, pull back and change viewpoints on the battlefield to give new context and perspective to the day’s events. There’s a lot of emphasis on logistics and interviews with historians who marvel at the amount of organization for the attack that the Allies were able to accomplish without the aid of computers.
D-DAY 360 Takes Advantage of Cutting-edge Technology to Re-create Historic Invasion – Data gathered though forensic laser scanning, 3D computer modeling and eye-witness accounts bring the battlefield to life as never before. The film takes advantage of light detection and ranging technology, or LiDAR, to re-create the landscape and allow viewers to switch effortlessly between the macro and the micro – pulling back for the big picture and zooming in to a close-up of a single soldier on the battlefield. It’s a new approach and perspective that tells the story with details never before available.