ASU students use new technology to create 3D images of wildfire aftermath

LOS ANGELES (AZFamily) — Using AI and new technology, Arizona State University students are creating 3D photos and videos that make you feel like you’re walking in the middle of wildfire aftermath.

The technology they used allows you to essentially walk around the area, as if you were there. The students hope these images provide context and help people understand the depth of destruction.

This unique perspective of the aftermath of wildfires that burned in Los Angeles earlier this year was created by ASU students as part of the Narrative and Emerging Media Program at ASU, based in downtown LA.

Grad student Ashley Buschhorn, who had to evacuate herself, was one of the students who set out to LA neighborhoods after the Palisades and Eaton fires burned through 40,000 acres in January and destroyed more than 16,000 buildings.

The team spent 10 days out there, using what’s called “Gaussian Splat” technology. “You can see the sheer level of detail that this provides,” Buschhorn said. “But also the sheer level of devastation. It was just house after house after house that was just complete rubble.”

Buschhorn described what this technology is. “You basically take images of every single angle that you can get of the object and then we put that into some computer software that uses AI to essentially map those images in space,” she said. “So once it kind of geospatially tracks all of those, then it’s able to essentially create a 3D model of that entire scene that you capture.”

They also captured 360 videos, creating before and after sequences, using Google Street View to show what neighborhoods once looked like. Buschhorn believes this perspective allows someone to step into the destruction and understand it a little bit better.

Nonny de la Pena leads the program at ASU. Three years ago, a fire burned her studio down in LA. She says dealing with insurance after a fire is challenging. She hopes fire victims can use these photos and scans when filing claims with insurance companies.

“When the insurance company said to me you don’t have a receipt for a sofa, I was able to go into that scan and zoom in and show the metal remains of an arm of a couch and say, ‘You can see it’s right there,’ and then they would pay,” she said. “Knowing the kind of battle that I had to go through, I felt that I just wanted to be able to give people any tools that I could to make it easier in their own process.”

See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.