BIOME SCAN TRIP
2024
Exploring the Epic Wilderness of Iceland
Join us for some insight in how we travel to digitalize the world
Johan Storkersen & Jan Klasen, Co-Founders of RealBiomes | 27/11/2024
“Large volcano eruption near the town of Grindavik. As we explore the area, sirens begin to sound and the entire sky lights up! We spot a crack several kilometers in length spewing out magma up to 50 meters high. The eruption was expected for several months so it came as no surprise—except to us!”
The Route
We began our journey in the capital Reykjavik.
Started by exploring the surrounding area
including the highly volcanic Grindavik area
to get a feel for the island. Luckily for us this
location already had a lot of what we needed.
We made our way east towards Stokksnes.
This place is renowed for it's beautiful black beaches and dramatic mountains, which is what we were after.
After we had captured what we needed
there, we moved north towards Krafla.
This is a large area with a lot of old dormant
volcanoes, hot springs and mud pools.
We started moving our way back towards Reykjavik, staying in Akureyri for one night before making the final drive towards the capital.
To capture the final missing elements we drove
to the Skjaldbreidur area, where we found a lot
of old dried lava fields with interesting shapes
and silhouettes to scan. Since this was at altitude, we even found ourselves surrounded by snow!
The final days we're spent in Reykjavik. We spent most of the time working and processing our captures to verify and make sure we had everything we should need!
Desolate roads
A 4x4 vehicle is requried by law to traverse much of the Icelandic inland
/ August 22, 18:49PM
Rocks rock
Until you have to find one that works
Spirits are high, motivation in check. You drive around for hours looking for a good spot, walk for an hour with a 20kg backpack and when you finally find what seems like a good spot, the real work begins. What defines a good rock? Is it the size, shape, color, texture, accessibility, usability?
There are a billion rocks out there, but in reality there very few that you actually want. Finding the right combination of factors can be decievingly tricky. We sometimes spent hours just looking, but finding the right object is the first critical part of the job as it can save you tons of trouble down the line.
Speaking of saving trouble
Grindavik Area
Working out in the field
On-location verification for quality and consistency
One of the big challenges, especially when scanning large and or oddly shaped objects is making sure you get the right coverage. Over time we realised bringing several laptops on-location is a necessity to mititage downstream issues that not only slow down development but often requires bruteforce approaches to fix, leaving quality on the table.
Objects often require hundreds if not thousands of images to be captured in detail, and keeping track of exactly where you have taken pictures becomes at some point futile and chances are you will miss some areas. The idea is simply to do a first pass, bring your images into your processing software and verify the alignment to get an overview over which areas have good coverage and which do not.
You want to make sure you have an efficient machine that strikes an ideal balance between battery-life and power. Too slow and you waste crucial time waiting for your verifications to complete, too fast and you likely run out of juice before you know it. Forget powerbanks to charge anything but a notebook, and forget bringing a generator in your backpack.
Tossing a few extra laptop batteries in your backpack is the preferred option in this case!
Special thanks to our friends at HP for supplying us with some great ZBook hardware, assisting us in our quest for consistency and quality!
Striking landscapes
Makes you wonder; how the f*** do we make this?
When you must toss the dice
Epic mountains
As soon as we stepped out of the car, we realised the big challenge here would be the wind. A constant and strong southerly wind battered us for our entire stay.
Scanning in such conditions is hard, especially when you are trying to capture sand. One strong gust of wind is all it could take and you might as well start over.
That said, sometimes you just have to push through it and hope for the best, even if a gust causes millions of sand particles to rush across your scouted surface or object.
Forget verifying, here you just have to be fast and precise.
/ August 27, 12:45PM
Stokksnes Peninsula
And enough wind to make you turn your car around
Artifacts
Building infrastructure on a volanic island has it's downsides
Sheep
Around every hill
Black beaches
There is beauty in simplicity
Icebergs
With Vatnajökull in the background, Europes second largest glacier
Rather hard to scan though. Fortunately not the reason we we’re here :)