Overview
In the second term of every academic year since 1986 Darwin College, part of the World renowned University of Cambridge, has organised a series of eight prestigious public lectures. Each series has been built around a single theme, approached in a multi-disciplinary way, and with each lecture prepared for a general audience by a leading authority on his or her subject. On 6th March 2020 our friend and colleague Dr Albert Yu-Min Lin delivered the last lecture in the current series (and possibly the last one for a while in this pandemic world) and presented an astonishingly wide-ranging and challenging discourse titled Archaeological Mysteries.
Dr. Albert Lin is an Associate Research Scientist at UC San Diego and an award winning Explorer of the National Geographic Society. An engineer by training, he has spent the last decade developing and applying technologies towards the exploration of our shared humanity. This journey has taken him from the Arctic Circle to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and from the deserts of the Middle East to the jungles of Central America. For this work Lin has received numerous recognitions including National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year, the United States Geospatial Intelligence Academic Achievement Award, the Explorer’s Club’s Lowell Thomas Medal, and the Nevada Medal (as the youngest ever recipient). An avid science communicator Lin has created nearly two dozen National Geographic and BBC documentary films, and currently hosts a National Geographic Channel series titled Lost Cities with Albert Lin. Visualskies are proud to have been asked to apply our unparalleled experience and bespoke approach to 3D scanning, both on the ground and in the air, landscape interpretation and spatial data visualisation to realise the ambitions of National Geographic for the series. We worked closely with Albert to develop a narrative based upon a scientific approach to the collection of spatial data, revealing secrets from the past long forgotten by the passage of time. The result is a series of ambitious programmes that deliver powerful, emotional stories with our hi-tech imagery to bring the mysteries of the past vividly into focus in the present.
Albert’s talk aimed to address the fundamental enigmas of our individual and collective imaginations. During the course of the 90 minute lecture he outlined how modern technologies have given birth to a new “golden age” of exploration, allowing us to go further, digitally stripping away the vegetation, and peer into the earth to reveal stories hidden beneath layers of time. From this ongoing work emerges a catalogue full of the various experiments in human understanding, expression, and imagination. Visualskies were delighted to be able to attend the lecture (unbeknownst to Albert until after the talk) and add their inside knowledge to the post-lecture discussions. It is a testament to the collaborative nature of Albert as a scientist, explorer and academic that he gave full credit to all those who have enabled him to undertake his unique blend of adventure and science and present the results of all our work in this most public forum.
Project
Lost Cities With Albert Lin
Client
N/A
What We Did
Attended the lecture
