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Digital Data Preservation and the Apple iPhone 12 Event featuring LiDAR! - ArchaeoTech 139
192 Plays4 years ago
We cover three different topics in three segments on today’s episode. In segment one we talk about digital data storage as preservation. The article linked below discusses the development and use of the WISAARD site file system in Washington State and how it helps archaeologists preserve sites through data. In segment two we talk about the Apple fall iPhone event and the new features that archaeologists can use. Finally, segment three features a single app of the day - the new compass and elevation features on the new Apple Watch series 6.
Links
App of the Day
- Webby: Apple Watch Series 6 Compass
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Archaeotech Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 139. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today, we discuss online digital information systems. Let's get to it. All
Challenges in Education During COVID-19
00:00:22
Speaker
right. Welcome back to the Archaeotech Podcast. Paul, how's it going? Oh, boy. Do you really want to know?
00:00:29
Speaker
I mean, no, it's October 13th and feels like the perpetual Friday, the 13th you're in New York and things are starting to backslide there. It sounds like, and there's all kinds of school and COVID and all kinds of issues. So I don't even want to know about the stress it's everywhere.
00:00:44
Speaker
Yeah, the stress has been really off the charts the last couple of weeks with the school reopening, not reopening, fights between the faculty and the board and teachers and parents and everybody. It's just, oh, it's exhausting. And everything gets revamped every couple of days because somebody has some new idea and then we as the IT department have to implement it, usually without full understanding of what needs to be done. So it's kind of like we're told to jump and then on our way up, we ask how high?
00:01:14
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, so it's it's it's yeah, maybe you live in interesting times, huh?
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, right? Well, education's actually taken quite a big hit, because we just talked about, actually, I wasn't even on the show, but episode 199 of the Sierra Mark ILG podcast. The subject of grad schools this fall, and not only that, but what are universities going to do, really, to keep making money? I mean, they have to have a lot of people to employ. They're for-profit institutions. They have to make money, right? So it's interesting what's going on over there, because one of the schools that is mentioned in the show, just go listen to it. It's, again, Sierra Mark 199.
00:01:48
Speaker
said that they're probably not even accepting grad students this year, at all, in the archaeology department, right? I don't know what the other departments are doing, but they're like, well, we can't even teach them really. There's no field schools. They can't get in the lab. They can't do anything. So we're just not going to do it. And that's a major institution. And they're also talking about institutions like that starting to, because they can't do field schools, bidding on CRM projects.
00:02:12
Speaker
Yeah. That was a fascinating discussion. I listened to that podcast episode. I'm just going to recommend it to any of our listeners. Even if you're not into CRM, that episode I think has a lot of meat to bite into about academia in general and about business practices and up and down. It's very applicable to a lot of different parts beyond just strictly CRM.
Developing Digital Information Systems for Cultural Resources
00:02:33
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, speaking of different parts, I don't know. That was a bad segue. Don't do it in any way. Yeah. I was wondering why.
00:02:42
Speaker
I'm not sure what's on my mind if I came up with the first part. We're going to discuss this podcast in three different parts. The first one, Paul and I both pinged on an article in the latest, I think it's whatever issue. Again, this is October. It just came out a few weeks ago, back in September. So the issue of SAA advances. And there's an article there called Beyond Data Recovery, Developing Digital Information Systems for Cultural Resources in the Online Era.
00:03:11
Speaker
I had to get out of that to pull something else up. It was written by Lance K. Woolwich, and I apologize Lance if I'm saying that wrong. Allison Brooks, Rob Smith, Morgan Mecklemore. Macklemore? I know, right? Let me try it again. Morgan Mecklemore.
00:03:27
Speaker
Annie Strader and Kim Gantt. And again, I apologize to any authors that I may have gotten this wrong, but essentially these people work for or work with the Washington state department of archeology and historic preservation, the state of Washington, basically Washington state. And they're discussing basically storing online digital data. And one of the systems that Washington uses is called wizard.
00:03:49
Speaker
W-I-S-A-A-R-D, and it stands for Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data. That's WIZARD. You know what? Essentially, this thing is an online repository for site forms and other information related to archaeology and, interestingly, architecture, as it says right there in the thing.
00:04:07
Speaker
I've had a chance to use Wizard. It was a long time ago. I'm sure it's changed much since then because this was probably six, seven years ago that I got into Wizard and was playing around with it. You can actually get a demo account for Wizard. You could anyway back in the day. I didn't try before reading this article to see if I could, but it would allow you to go in just to kind of familiarize yourself with the Wizard system and then you have to of course apply for access. I don't know what the qualifications are, but you have to apply for access to be able to
00:04:31
Speaker
use it. But it's a pretty, it was a pretty nice system. It's basically an online GIS that allows you access to, you know, to all the data. Paul, did you not probably having seen that information before? Did you pull anything out of this article that kind of caught your attention? There was nothing really new. Well, I've never used the system. So
00:04:48
Speaker
In one sense, it's all new to me, but in terms of the overall vision of it, there was nothing new to it. It was interesting in that they basically, this is a 25-year project, and so they're documenting the history of this from the mid-90s onward through different permutations, early things done in Excel and Access, and becoming more comprehensive, bringing in scanned materials, going online, changing platforms, and so on.
00:05:15
Speaker
And so if you read it, not really for, you know, in a sense of like what you can do, but how this particular project evolved, I think that's interesting because then you could feed that back into if you're working on your own project, maybe some ideas, pitfalls, good ideas, bad ideas, things to do, things to avoid, and so on. And then if you're also if you're just interested, kind of in the general history of it, because this tracks with much of my
00:05:39
Speaker
lived experience as an archaeologist that focused mostly on digital technologies. You know, it felt familiar, but that said, that familiarity also meant that there wasn't a whole lot that was new to me in the broad sense, so it was all new to me in the specifics of what they had to say.
00:05:56
Speaker
Other thing, and this gets to what you were just saying about getting access, there were two points that I thought were both extremely obvious, but I'm glad that they documented what they did and how they did. One of those was access. They had, I think, six different tiers of access between general public that could view certain kinds of data all the way up to the system administrators who could have full access over everything within the system.
00:06:20
Speaker
So, I thought that was worthwhile to see the breakdown, the rubric, the grid that they had of type of person, what role that person would have then with that system, and then what they could see given that particular role. And the other thing that they mentioned, and I'm just tossing all these out here, so we'll see where this discussion goes. And the other one that I thought was very important was they talked about the importance of training.
00:06:46
Speaker
whether that's in person on site or through materials available on the internet, so that people would know how to learn to use the system to find what they needed to find. I thought that those were the access. Actually, they both revolve around access, don't they? One is who has access to want, and the other is how do you actually have access to things?
Importance of Digital Data Preservation in Archaeology
00:07:07
Speaker
If you don't know how to use a system, just because you have a login doesn't mean that you really have access.
00:07:12
Speaker
And so I thought that those were for me the two take-homes, that they were considering these and that every project needs to consider these.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting too, because the couple things that I took away from this were one of the things that they mentioned in the abstract that they kind of get into down near the end. Again, it's weird that the bulk of the article is basically a history of the program, right? They weren't really getting into a lot of it. And I get it. If somebody's never seen this before, it could be a novel thing, the way that they've done it and the way that it's changed throughout the years. I think according to the article, they're on the eighth iteration, the eighth release.
00:07:42
Speaker
And one of the things that they mentioned, though, that I never really thought about, but totally makes sense, is that if they are, and maybe this is why they talked about all the different iterations of what it can do now and then that tiered level of access, like you just mentioned, they said that this could be a tool for historic preservation and that satisfies the ACHP or the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation requirements for historic preservation. And in that, this is a state of Washington tool, right?
00:08:09
Speaker
There's a lot of public land in Washington, just like there is in Nevada, California, Oregon. There's a lot of public land, a lot of BLM land, a lot of Forest Service land. And one of the ways that they deal with, I guess, land in those areas is the BLM will lease out land to other people, but more importantly, they'll sell land. And they're often not losing any land because they'll
00:08:29
Speaker
And this is a little bit shady. I'm not saying this happens all the time, but I know for a fact that they'll sell land that's heavy in mineral rights or something like that, and then they'll buy land that's not so good for pretty much anything. Then they'll just basically trade. So, they're selling land and they're buying land somewhere else. But a lot of times,
00:08:46
Speaker
They are selling land that has documented cultural resources on it. One of the ways to preserve those cultural resources is through data. We're just acknowledging the fact that they're probably going to be destroyed, unless some other mitigating factor has taken place. But more often than not, most of your archaeological sites are what we call non-significant. That's not a slide on any traditional cultural properties or Native American destinations. That's just the definitions that we give them. They say they're non-significant, so if they're non-significant or
00:09:15
Speaker
not eligible, basically, then whatever construction company or mine or whatever has the ability to come in and basically demolish it. Then it's destroyed. From a data preservation standpoint, that is a really good way. Obviously, we'd like to keep them in place, but if we can't, the next best thing is to record as much data as we can about them. That's one thing this system does well, is it records
00:09:37
Speaker
all the attributes you would need and does it in a way that is accessible. That's the more important thing too, that it's accessible to a large group of people in a tiered way so you can have different access levels. But that's really interesting and I've always thought about data preservation as preservation in general.
00:09:54
Speaker
recording and much data. Whenever I'm on an archaeological site recording it, I always try to record as much as I possibly can because I know that it's possible no one's ever going to do this or see this again. And the only record of this entire archaeological site is going to be what I'm writing down right now. And that's a lot of pressure. At least it feels like a lot of pressure.
00:10:11
Speaker
And from that standpoint, like I said, that could be a preservation method. It's like one thing I heard in, God, I don't even remember when I heard this. I heard this a long time ago, back when I was a field tech, probably got my master's. And it was mentioned over here on the East Coast where I'm at now. They put up a lot of buildings and stuff, and they can't avoid archaeological sites in a lot of cases, because there's nowhere to avoid it, right? It's a heavily populated area. It's not like the West, where you can just move your pipeline 100 miles and still be good. You've got to build where you've got to build. But preservation and Native Americans seem to be OK with this, because they'd rather leave things in situ.
00:10:41
Speaker
could be just putting a store over the top of it, right? As long as it's a deeply buried site, if you've got paleo deposits and you've cored down and you know they're there but you haven't excavated, you just put a slab over the top of it and put a Walmart on top of it. There's no better preservation, right? Because nobody's ever going to touch that again. And that's how most Native American groups would like to see it, is that nobody touches it. It stays in situ. They don't mess with it. It sucks that it's got a slab and a Walmart over the top of it, but it's better than excavating the whole thing and putting it in a museum.
00:11:08
Speaker
It depends on how you visualize it, but having a way to... We've always recorded sites, but having a way to actually document those and store that documentation in a way that's accessible to different groups of people is incredibly important. And this does that really, really well. And that's one of the things they highlight in this.
00:11:27
Speaker
I did find it interesting. It was not a major point of it, but they actually did use, I think the word destroyed. And they said, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that, and like you alluded to just now, it doesn't necessarily mean that the site has been dug up to make way for, you know,
00:11:43
Speaker
who knows what a road, let's say. It can also mean that the property that the site is on has changed hands. And so even though nobody's touched it, it's destroyed in the sense of accessibility to that site because it's now on private property and nobody can get to it.
00:11:59
Speaker
And then if the owners of said private property wanted to do something to it, you wouldn't have a whole lot of recourse necessarily to prevent them from doing that. So it's kind of like Schrodinger site, right? It's destroyed. It's not destroyed. You won't know until you open up the box.
00:12:16
Speaker
That was interesting because so much about what they were looking at, and I'm going to use the word again, is access. They're looking at preserving data so that people could access them and so that people could look at in the future and find out what's already been done, whether those sites still exist or whether they've been under whatever circumstances, quote, unquote, destroyed.
00:12:38
Speaker
I think that's a healthy way of looking at it. We come up with the word access a lot when we talk about computers in the digital realm and open source software and open data and open publications. Access is kind of a slippery term, too. You can make something open, but if nobody can access it, they can't get to it because they've got crappy internet or they don't know that it exists.
00:13:05
Speaker
or they can download it but can't use it because they don't have the proper training or the proper equipment to use it, is it really accessible? They clearly, through the various iterations of this project over two decades, they've been thinking about matters of access as well.
Iterative Development of Archaeological Digital Tools
00:13:24
Speaker
I think that's a really, really important part of what we have to do as archaeologists if we're serious about preserving things, is we have to think about access
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, because the old idea of, and it's still a current idea, unfortunately, but the old idea of just putting artifacts in a bag, sticking them in a box and put them on a shelf. I mean, it works in probably a lot of cases, but in some cases it just simply doesn't work because maybe the labels fell off, maybe the box got misplaced, maybe, you know, something. And I actually, when you said Schrodinger's site, the site exists until you open the box, right? I literally have that example. When I did my thesis at the University of Georgia for my master's degree,
00:14:01
Speaker
It's a short accelerator program, so you generally don't have time to excavate a complete site, analyze it, and do whatever you're going to do. They have a lot of sites that were excavated with reservoir projects back in the 70s that were simply just never analyzed. You've got collections of artifacts, field notes, and that's basically it. For my site, I had
00:14:21
Speaker
close to 60 boxes of artifacts in the Georgia site files on the rolling stacks that were labeled for this site. And I basically went through, cleaned everything, reanalyzed all the ceramics, the lithics, and basically wrote a site report. And that was my thesis. I did some extra stuff because it's a thesis, not a site report, but that was basically it. And one of those boxes was empty.
00:14:40
Speaker
I'm like, no joke. One of the boxes labeled for that site was empty. And in fact, a few of them only had one little bag of artifacts in it. And I'm like, is that? There was no inventory written on the box. There was no master document that was an inventory of everything. I didn't know how many boxes there were without just looking every... I mean, I looked through all the boxes. There were
00:15:01
Speaker
probably thousands of boxes in there. And I looked through all of them just to make sure I didn't have a misplaced box. That took me like a week. And my advisor actually recommended I do that because he's like, eh, stuff gets moved around. I'm like, are you kidding me? And there's no documentation to this. And obviously, they couldn't really digitally preserve it back in the 70s. But now we can. And at the very least, we have that information at the site, at the collection point, that digital information. And if we have a safe place to put it like this, I won't get lost. So yeah, that's insane.
00:15:31
Speaker
Anyway, I don't really have a whole lot more to say on this, because that seems like a no-brainer in 2020, although people still aren't doing it and not doing it correctly. Wizards always had good fans. I know a lot of people that work in Washington and that have worked in Washington, and they've rarely had anything bad to say about Wizard, even with the earlier versions that probably had some brewing paints. But I think they're on the way to doing it right.
00:15:51
Speaker
Well, it's nice to see somebody documenting what's a mature system that's in use and isn't just a thought model, you know, hey, here's what we did. It worked for us in this particular case, but here's something that we did and iterated upon for a long time. There's so many projects out there, and not just in archaeology, but, you know, the computer world's really large that are, you know, they're kind of test cases. And whether they get beyond that or not is, you know,
00:16:17
Speaker
might happen, might not. Here's something nice to see that's beyond that test case. It's an actual use case, important tool that's being employed by people and has been thought about a lot. So that's nice. Yeah. All right. Well, on that note, we're going to take our first break and then we're going to come back and talk about my favorite topic, the Apple event. It was today and not my army. That's my second favorite topic.
00:16:44
Speaker
Yeah, we're going to come back and talk about the Apple iPhone 12 event. Don't groan and change the channel because, or turn off this, change the channel. What the hell? What year is this? Don't groan and turn off the podcast because this is actually really important. Even if you're an Android person, there's some good stuff coming out in here because competition is healthy. And if Apple's coming out with some of this stuff, Android's going to be coming out with some of this stuff and vice versa. Apple comes out with a lot of stuff that Android comes out with. So let's talk about what happened today and some of the cool things that they announced when we get back from the break.
00:17:14
Speaker
Welcome back
New iPhone 12 Features Discussion
00:17:15
Speaker
to the architect podcast episode 139. This is segment two, and we are going to talk about the Apple iPhone event that took place today, October 13th, 2020. And if you're listening to this in real time, that was just this week. In fact, the
00:17:30
Speaker
iPhone 12, I think the regular iPhone 12. They have a mini, they have an iPhone 12. They have the iPhone 12 SE, I think. That's all available for pre-order this Friday. Again, if you're listening to this in real time, it's all available for pre-order this Friday. And they did a cool thing that I don't know if they did it last year because I actually haven't bought a new iPhone in two years. I missed the last two cycles.
00:17:50
Speaker
And it used to be that they said, Oh, if pre-order is open Friday, that means midnight Pacific time, which was fine for me when I was in the top Pacific time zone, but that means 3 AM Eastern time. So that's a little, that's a little rough because if you don't order it within the first
00:18:06
Speaker
I don't know, 25, 30 seconds, then you're going to be two months out on your delivery. If you order it within the first minute or so, 30 seconds to a minute, whether you're on AT&T, Verizon, Apple's website, whatever, then you get put in line, right? And you might get it next week. Because usually it's delivery starting the following Friday from pre-orders. But this time, it's 5 AM Pacific time.
00:18:28
Speaker
which is not too bad, because that's 8am Eastern time, and that's reasonable. Now, they did say that the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and possibly the 12 Pro, that was a little bit ambiguous to me. Those are just the bigger ones. Those pre-orders aren't starting until November 6th, I believe. Either way, it's the first week of November, so you're going to have to wait a little longer if you want one of those.
00:18:50
Speaker
I'll tell you what, we'll talk about what's special about those, the reason why you might want the Macs specifically. But all the iPhones are 5G now. The iPhone 12s are 5G, so that's pretty great. I don't even live in a 5G service area, typically. Paul, you do, which is awesome. If you ever got a 5G phone, if you guys don't know what 5G is,
00:19:12
Speaker
It's like the difference between trying to download, they always use movies. I honestly don't know who watches movies on their phone, but I'll use movies anyway. But if you want to download a 4K movie onto your phone on 4G cellular speeds, first off, you must be rich because you have all the data. But second,
00:19:27
Speaker
It's going to take like 30 minutes, right? If not longer. And that's with a really full LTE signal. That's going to take like 30 minutes. 5G should take less than a minute, if not less than 30 seconds. That's the logarithmic expansion in speed that we have here with 5G.
00:19:42
Speaker
In fact, it's such a big jump in speed. People are already talking about what 6G could be, and 6G, they're saying, is the time when we put our consciousness on the internet and we have representations of ourselves like Ready Player One or something like that. That's what 6G is. That's how much these jumps are. I don't remember the jump between 3G and 4G being huge like that.
00:20:03
Speaker
But barely the jump from 5G to 6G is we live on the internet now. But some of the big differences that all these have is pro-raw photos. So they're no longer baking in all the changes. The changes are layered, which what that means is they've got all their processors working on your photo to do this and that and the other thing to it.
00:20:23
Speaker
But now you can go in, and it's a raw photo in the sense that it's layered. So you can go in and change those different aspects of your original photograph that you took. And that's phenomenal. And you can do it right on the phone, too. You don't have to do it in fancy editing software. You can, but you don't have to. And they're also doing pro-raw video. So that's, I mean, I can't even
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I can't even understand it. And if you get the Pro Max, it's got four cameras on it, three on the back and one on the front, and they're all capable of it. And it's just insane. The video and the camera capability, even if you don't get the Max, they all have really great cameras and just awesome capabilities. And I honestly don't know why anybody would be taking a point and shoot, or even in most cases, an SLR out into the field anymore. It's just phenomenal what these cameras can do these days. So I don't know what that's going to do to the battery life, but that's where it is.
00:21:13
Speaker
A couple other things, they say that the glass on the front is four times stronger. I think people are still going to be putting cases on there because we just can't not put cases on our phones. But we're getting to the point where we might not have to put cases on phones, right? We're getting really, really, really close to that. And I think that'll be super cool. I still think the phones are too slippery if you don't have a case on it. Like I've gone around the house without a case on my phone.
00:21:33
Speaker
And then you drop the thing on my face. You know, you're just like laying on the couch and you're something to hold it up or you're in bed and you just like drop it on your head because it's too slippery. It's all fancy and shiny and it's too slippery. I use only a very thin one and just to give a little extra grip. Otherwise, uh, no. Yeah. Yeah. Me too.
00:21:54
Speaker
Exactly. Exactly. Now if they had like a matte rough finish almost, like they want everything to be smooth and shiny, but, and then they, they really don't want you to put a case on it. And because they, they show it always without a case, although there's an exception this time around and I'll talk about it, but.
00:22:10
Speaker
They show it that way and yet it's literally unusable. Think about being out in the field with sweaty hands or with gloves on or something like that. I have a pretty decent case on mine and I still have a hard time holding onto it. I have to put the case with the silicone stripes on the back of it or around the edge with a bumper around it just to be able to hold it and not drop the damn thing when you're hiking or doing something.
00:22:33
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, so that's coming down a lot more. What that means is they're just more rugged. So if you do end up dropping it, even with a case on it, and you hit it just right, then it's got a better chance of being okay. So another thing that's good for archaeologists, I think, and this is relating to the case, is they've got this, for anybody that's seen an Apple watch, there's like a round, like the back of a watch, right? It's this round plug that you basically magnetize to the back of it.
00:22:58
Speaker
And then that's how you charge your Apple watch. Well, they've got a bigger one, a flatter one, and they're calling it, it's a MagSafe connector. And they've got these magnets inside the phone. And you just basically, instead of plugging into the port on the bottom, which it still has, you just use the MagSafe adapter to go to the back. What this means is the iPhone 13 is not going to have a plug anymore.
00:23:16
Speaker
I think that's exactly what that means. But you just use the MagSafe adapter on the back and you can charge it with just magnetism, you know, just putting it right on there. But the cool thing is they're opening that up to a lot of other accessories. They showed a case that just magnetizes onto the back. They showed like a wallet that just magnetizes onto the back with cards and stuff in it. All kinds of cool stuff that you can just create a whole accessory market around that circle magnet, that strong magnet and just magnetize it to the phone. It's pretty sweet.
00:23:42
Speaker
transmit data. I haven't looked at that. So does it transmit data of any kind or is it just power? They didn't mention that, but if they're not thinking about that, you know they are. If they didn't say it, you know that it's in the plan somewhere. And I don't know if it's like a firmware release that's going to open that or if that's just opening it up to future development. But that only makes sense, right?
00:24:01
Speaker
just transferring stuff through that. Yeah, well, it sounds like a step back from what we've had for a number of years now on Androids and on iPhones is the wireless charging. So like on my desk, I've got one of those little Qi QI wireless chargers. I just set my phone in there and it charges and I don't have to plug or unplug any cables. But it seems like if you have kind of a semi proprietary magnetic adapter thing, that'd be a step back from just this standard Qi wireless charging.
00:24:27
Speaker
I don't think this is removing that. I think you're right. They didn't mention that, but I don't think this is removing that. I think this is in addition to that. I have my phone set up one of those same things right now too. I think you can still do that because I can't see them getting rid of that. Now, that being said, I've tried setting my watch on one of these things and it doesn't work. It needs the proprietary thing. The one for the watch is also a little bit concave to fit the roundness of the back of the watch.
00:24:53
Speaker
And if you don't get that exactly on there right, it magnetizes so it's not hard. But if you try to use something else, it just doesn't work. Whereas the back of the iPhone is flat. And this thing is flat. And it goes right on there. And I think that still means that you can charge it wirelessly with something else. Because it still probably is doing the key charging, right? Or Chi? How do you say that? Chi? I don't know.
00:25:13
Speaker
I think that the Chinese and the Q usually sounds to English speakers like CH, but I could be entirely 100% wrong. I know three words in Chinese and that's it. Right. So anyway, I think, I think this just adds a magnet to it, to be honest, so that it holds better. And, and that's all it's doing. Cause it's still wirelessly charging, right? You're just, you're just magnetizing your charger to the phone.
LiDAR Technology in iPhones for Archaeology
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, I get it. So I think that's the case. Some other cool things for all the phones, of course, water and dust resistant. I haven't concerned myself with dropping my phone in water or doing anything. I even rinse it off in the sink half the time, right? If I get a bunch of dust and dirt on it.
00:25:57
Speaker
because ever since I think the eight or maybe even earlier, they've been pretty much impervious to water. I mean, if you take them deep enough, it'll soak in. But these are water and dust resistant up to six meters now. I think it used to be three meters. Now it's at six meters. And they used to be 30 minutes at that depth. I don't know what the depth is on this. It just says six meters on the thing that I'm looking at.
00:26:16
Speaker
So that's all the features that are similar to all the phones, all the new phones. The one thing that you get with the Max is LiDAR. And we've already seen a few tweets where people in the heritage sector are talking about LiDAR and site mapping and stuff like that. But it's really going to be the third party app market that makes really big use of the LiDAR because what Apple is using the LiDAR for, realistically, they talked about a lot of things, but realistically, it's enhanced augmented reality, right? They need to be able to map the room,
00:26:45
Speaker
and they're mapping the room, they can, LiDAR doesn't need light, so it can do it in the dark, it can do it in the light, it can do it anywhere, but it can map the room and give you real augmented reality where things are being placed in the right orientation, things are, you know, games, everything happens exactly where it needs to happen because it's accurately mapped the room. Anybody who's played with augmented reality on their phone, whether you're just looking through the screen, I mean, things are off a little bit, right? It's not bad, but they're off a little bit.
00:27:10
Speaker
This is this is gonna place them Exactly on your table or exactly on your floor or when you're doing in the IKEA placement for the new table you want to buy using their augmented reality It's gonna be legit where it's supposed to be and it's not gonna be bleeding into the wall because the app the phone knows exactly where the wall is You know down to the micron practically and it knows it knows exactly so it's using it for that It's using it to make better depth of field judgments on photos Using it to basically just enhance photo and video all around but I think
00:27:39
Speaker
As they open up that API for the Lidar, I think other app developers are going to be coming up with some new fun and interesting ways to use that. I don't know if archaeology is ever really going to see something anytime soon anyway that really can benefit us because nobody's thinking about the archaeology space when they're developing these apps. But maybe, you never know, it's getting cheaper and cheaper to develop apps. So maybe somebody will come up with something that
00:28:03
Speaker
archaeologists can actually use this for. But can you think of anything, Paul, that the iPhone at that level, basically, I mean, we're used to hearing about LiDAR being flown over like a jungle to find, you know, old structures and things. But what can we use it for at just the handheld level? I don't even honestly know. Yeah, right. So the examples that they've shown are really like texture mapping, more like
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah, photogrammetry like structure from motion type stuff, as opposed to what we think of with LiDAR and when you're mapping your myocytes through the jungle is hoping you get those pulses that go down through the canopy so you can see the surface that's otherwise invisible from overhead because it's obscured by the canopy.
00:28:39
Speaker
What I did think of, and shout out to Jamie who sent a link a little earlier today about this, is the example that was shown was mapping out a few rooms of a house with furniture and everything in place. It wasn't perfect, but it was a really quick way to generate a fairly realistic look of these multiple rooms he could then zoom down into and move around in.
00:29:01
Speaker
Like in any video game for example and what I was thinking of was back in I believe it was 98 in Petra on the Excavation that we're working on on the Great Temple Who was it was Eileen vote was working on a project with some some engineers back at Brown that were mapping
00:29:21
Speaker
doing a photogrammetric mapping of one part of the temple that we're working on and it was really well received but it was a multi-million dollar project that they did and it took a lot a lot of time and a lot of computing power to do it and what we have here instead is just this handheld
00:29:39
Speaker
your phone,
Future of Digital Tools in Archaeology
00:29:40
Speaker
which you use for making calls and sending texts and keeping messages and lists and whatever else you do, and just quickly getting something that was of comparable, if not better quality nearly instantaneously. So I do actually think that it'll be useful for archaeologists and people doing historical preservation, not necessarily for their final documentation of things, but definitely as one step in the documentation process.
00:30:06
Speaker
Actually, let me put it like this. How many times have you gone to a site or something and just taken a picture? It doesn't even have to be a site. You could be shopping at a store, right? And you pull out your phone and you take a quick picture just to remind yourself of something, the skew number of something or what something looks like in a place or something that you thought was a little anomalous or interesting or whatever.
00:30:27
Speaker
literally yesterday and so you take that quick picture on your phone it's not for publication it's not for you know building some grand theory over it's something to help remind yourself of what it looks like well i think that that the lidar tools are going to be like that too it's going to be able to give yourself a quick
00:30:46
Speaker
fairly accurate impressionistic sense of what it's like to be at a particular place at a particular time. And I think that will be useful for archaeologists. Again, not necessarily as the end result of anything, but certainly as a step in that process to get their end results.
00:31:01
Speaker
Yeah, and to take that just a half a step further too, think about photogrammetry, right? I originally was thinking when I first saw this this morning that, wow, now you can walk around and you can get a LiDAR picture of this and you can tie it to a photo sequence. But really the phone's smarter than that. It's already doing the LiDAR depth mapping when you take a photograph, right? So if you just have an app that can stitch all that together and then get the background out of it, we already have computers that'll do that. We just need to be able to take this data and do that. Because I think that's the one thing that's
00:31:32
Speaker
really not being thought about too much. And I think we're going to be starting to think about that a lot more because with photogrammetry, it's using the shadows and the photos themselves to actually create depth. Right. And that's not, this wouldn't be straight photogrammetry. This would be photogrammetry with a LiDAR perspective. We don't usually get that.
00:31:47
Speaker
in photogrammetry because lidar is often plane mounted, right? It's large scale, plane mounted landscape lidar. And you're just not doing that for a structure. You're not doing that for a small feature. You're not doing that for something, probably because who's going to take the time to do that for like a, you know, a mining pit. But now that we have this lidar with a phone in our pocket, why not create a 3D representation of literally every single feature and artifact that you record? If all it means is you're still just snapping a picture.
00:32:13
Speaker
And yet you're getting, maybe you have to snap eight pictures instead of one picture, but you're snapping pictures and the things putting it together and giving you a model. Why not? Again, that goes back to the first segment. If we can record that stuff in the best way possible, whether or not we think it can be useful now, why wouldn't we do that?
00:32:32
Speaker
I'm pretty excited. Things are progressing pretty quickly. And I think those jumps, like thinking about the jump from 5G to 6G just makes me think that in our lifetimes, how quickly things are going. I mean, just look at 20 years ago, look at 30 years ago, look at 40 years ago for those that can. I can barely look at 40 years ago. I don't know, I was five. I was older than five. I think you had your PhD by then.
00:33:05
Speaker
No. Anyway, just thinking about where we're going in such short periods of time is pretty cool. I think the takeaway here is the heritage industry, and it really is an industry, needs to stay abreast of this situation. One of the things I mentioned right at the top of the segment was
00:33:21
Speaker
I'm not surprised people are using the actual Apple announcement to be excited about LiDAR when it was actually announced that they were going to have LiDAR back at WWDC, their developer conference in June. We've known about this. We've been talking about this. People in the tech space have been saying it. And if people in the heritage space want to stay abreast of the latest changes so they can do the best job they can doing their jobs, well, it's time to start paying attention to that news as well.
00:33:46
Speaker
and just keep on top
Apple Watch Series 6 in Fieldwork
00:33:49
Speaker
of it. You might not have the tech right away. You might not be able to even afford it, by the way. But if you know it exists and you have a client or somebody that says, hey, I want to be able to do this for the lowest cost possible, of course, what is the best tool for that? If you don't have all the information at your fingertips, then in my mind, you're not doing your job and you need to
00:34:07
Speaker
Obviously, you can't pay attention to everything, but just don't close your eyes to it and keep an open mind when it comes to the brand new stuff coming out because it's changing fast and we don't want to be left behind like we usually are. All right. Well, that's it for this segment. Let's come back. I've got a really short app of the day for the third segment, so we'll do that on the other side of the break.
00:34:27
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the final segment to the Archaeotech podcast, episode 139. And this is just a really quick app of the day that I actually just discovered over the last couple of days. I ordered the new, again, it's all Apple episode this time for the last two segments, but I ordered the new Apple watch series six, like month ago.
00:34:45
Speaker
and when it came out. And I just got it on Sunday. It actually delivered on Friday as we're speaking here on October 13th, but I got it on Sunday when I got to my sister-in-law's house where I had it delivered. And I haven't had a new Apple Watch since the Series 4, so I had to completely skip the 5. I don't know if there was something in between there, but I just didn't receive a need to upgrade it. It was doing really well, but there was so many
00:35:03
Speaker
new features coming out of the six and to be honest my four I mean I'm I wear it every day like a watch right like I wear it every day I do a lot of stuff with it and I've noticed some battery issues with it like sometimes sometimes something will just run in the background the battery will be dead by noon most of the time I put it on in the morning at 5 5 30 in the morning and I take it off around
00:35:25
Speaker
10, 30, 11 o'clock at night, give or take. And I've still got 20, 30% power. But lately, it's just been tanking. So I was like, all right, if they came out the new one, I'm going to go ahead and get it. And a couple of things that the new one has, first off, if you're interested in blood oxygen levels, I did mine the first time because it has a new sensor for that. And it said 98%. I had to look it up to see, OK, that's great. What does that mean? Am I healthy or am I going to die soon? What does that actually mean?
00:35:51
Speaker
Apparently, 95 to 100 is acceptable for most humans. So I guess 98 is good. I don't know if you're supposed to be on the high side of that or the low side. But one of the cool things that I wanted to talk about, though, is when I was setting up my watch face, all the little apps that represent themselves on your watch face, depending on which one you have, I like the one that's called Infograph, because you can basically put eight on here, four around the corners, and then four on the inside dials.
00:36:15
Speaker
And it really just tells me all the things I need to know for the important stuff that I need to do. And one of the things that I saw was a default on that when I turned on was altitude. And I'm looking at it right now, and it's just showing me a red triangle on top, a white one on the bottom. And if I literally raise my arm up, it goes up a foot. And I bring my arm down, it goes down a foot. It's super accurate. And that's pretty cool. And then I clicked on it. I'm going to do that right now.
00:36:41
Speaker
When you tap on it, you get this really slick compass and the compass is oriented. It knows how it's sitting on my wrist and I can move my arm around. I'm doing that right now. You can't see me, but I can move my arm around and see this compass. I can actually add a bearing too. And then it shows me the difference in my bearing either way, left to right, you know, that I need to go to get back to my bearing.
00:37:03
Speaker
And on the compass dial, it's also showing me latitude and longitude. It'll show me that if I scroll up, but it's on the compass dial, showing me elevation on the compass dial, and it's showing me incline. So if I rotate my wrist towards me, I can see the incline going up in degrees. It's not in percent, which we typically use in archeology for determining slope. So you'd have to convert that. And I haven't seen if there's a setting where I could actually convert that to percent, but it is showing it to me in degrees. And if you just know,
00:37:30
Speaker
what you're looking for. Like we were looking for a 30% slope on this last one as a no-go. And I think 30% was pretty close to 30 degrees in that case. That's one of the numbers that's really not too far off from itself. But anyway, it's a super cool compass. I can't believe how awesome it is. And the watch has always had some sort of orientation inside, but never a compass like this. And this compass is super, I could actually use this for field work. That's what I was going to ask.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, I just hit the button and it's right there and I can, it's super accurate and I can see and it's just, it's awesome. I honestly would use this for pretty much everything because it's a single degree compass as well, which most people don't even have one degree compasses. Their resolution is like two degrees. And some of the really cheap ones are like five degrees. So this is spot on and I can hold it up at eye level and the watch face is visible almost all the way down to completely level. I can see the watch face and I can see
00:38:25
Speaker
as I move my wrist around, which bearing I'm at, then I just tilt it towards me and say, okay, I'm facing 270 west. And that's the direction I'm going to go. It's surprisingly good, surprisingly good. So you think this would be useful for people doing transects, for example?
00:38:40
Speaker
Absolutely. I don't see why not. Doing transects, recording the orientation of a feature, whatever you need. I think this would be incredibly accurate for that. I think the only thing it would be challengingly accurate for is the inclinometer. Because I don't really know, unless I can get my wrist sideways, how am I really determining the incline of something, unless I'm, I don't know, line of sight. I'd have to play with that to see exactly how accurate that is. But it's really just an orientation of my wrist. I don't bend that way.
00:39:06
Speaker
in order for it to actually work really well. It's a nice thought. They had the ability, so they put it in there. But I don't know how accurate that is. But the compass and the bearing, phenomenal. And they increased the battery life on these things, too. They put bigger batteries in them. The watch is still the same size, but somehow the battery is bigger. And I haven't had any problems. I'm fully charged up overnight because I don't wear it to sleep.
00:39:28
Speaker
And then I put it on in the morning, and I still had 50% when I went to bed last night. And that was easy to do all day, running a workout, doing all kinds of stuff, and still great. Of course, it's brand new. The battery's usually good when it's brand new. We'll see how it is in a year. That'll be the real test. But yeah, I just had to mention that because I was so surprised by how accurate, how awesome it is, and how just smooth it works, and how visible it is, and how easy it is to see. So I like it.
00:39:55
Speaker
I have a, speaking of battery life, I have a recollection of you talking about your previous watch when you got it, having some app that you liked, but that it really drained the battery. And I can't remember at the moment what that was some function. That was the decibel, the decibel reader. That was it. Yeah. Yeah. I had it on the screen. So it was constantly measuring decibels and my watch died in like two hours.
00:40:16
Speaker
Yeah, no good. And it was just constantly making the reading. This will do the same thing, and I haven't tried it. That's a good thing, though. I should turn that on and see how the battery handles it. Because it's a complication. I could just turn the app on before, but now it's a complication you could put onto your face. So it's always showing you the decibel reading. And I think the way they intend that, you can just swipe across the top and change your faces.
00:40:38
Speaker
If you know you're going to be in a noisy environment, you want a constant measurement, you can just swap to another face that's got that on there and then use it. I don't know. Who knows? I'll have to try that out and see how it handles the battery.
Conclusion and Health Precautions
00:40:51
Speaker
Any final thoughts on this episode, Paul? We're going to cut it early. No, I think let's tie a bow on this one and get back to our millions of things we've got to deal with today.
00:41:01
Speaker
That's right. All right. Well, thanks, everybody, for listening. If you plan on getting that new iPhone 12 Max, remember that the Max Pro is the only one that has the LiDAR. So if that's what you're interested in, don't go buy the cheaper iPhone 12. It's simply not going to have it. The Max Pro is the only one with the LiDAR. And it starts at, I think, 1099 or 1199. And that's 128 gigabytes. And they go up to 512. So pretty big.
00:41:22
Speaker
I know, I know. In fact, the pro might even go to a terabyte. I'll have to look at that. But it's phenomenal what they're doing these days. I mean, if they're recording Dolby Vision HDR 4K video and allow you to edit, they have to have the space for that. Raw video, forget it. Raw video. Yeah. Yeah. That little picture you just took of your two month old just cost you 16 gigabytes. All right. Well, thanks everybody for being here and we will see you next time. Yeah. And wash your hands, wear your mask, because we want to see you next time.
00:41:52
Speaker
That's right. Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:42:24
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.