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A billion laser points helped bring Notre Dame back to life
- class4group9term25
- 30 thg 10, 2025
- 2 phút đọc
(CNN) — After a catastrophic fire five years ago, the Notre Dame Cathedral de Paris reopened this month looking almost the same as it did when it was first constructed in 1163.
The massive reconstruction project was a testament not just to the hard work of the French people – but also to the lasers, drones and other advanced technology that gave rebuilders a window into the building’s past.
“The time frame wouldn’t have been possible without the record of what existed,” Amy Bunszel, executive vice president of architecture, engineering and construction at 3D-software company Autodesk, told CNN. Her company was a major part of creating a model of the building as it existed before the fire, giving the reconstruction effort a sort of guide for what to do. “It would’ve required a lot more guesswork. Imagine taking millions of tourist photographs (as a reference point) versus having one consolidated perfect representation.”
The technology allowed France to meet President Emmanuel Macron’s ambitious five-year goal for rebuilding the landmark. It took teams at several companies combining rounds of damage assessments, specially created maps and advanced techniques that are now used in everything from film animation to construction.
And it took a little luck, too.
A billion points of lasers
The reconstruction, in one sense, started even before the fire. In a stroke of luck, in 2015, art historian Andrew Tallon carefully scanned the building with lasers. Tallon, who studied Gothic architecture, was trying to understand how medieval builders erected some of Europe’s great cathedrals.
His initial effort – four years before flames engulfed the cathedral – required 12 lasers and a team of seven engineers to scan the building and collect 46,000 images, according to Bunszel. The spatial map he created used more than a billion laser-measured points, and he revealed some previously unknown details about the cathedral – like how the interior columns at the western end of the cathedral do not line up.
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