In July 2001, a team from the Center for Design Visualization at the University of California, Berkeley undertook a three week field trip to the Tambo Colorado site, a 15th century Incan administrative center, located in present day Peru. They documented the site with a Cyrax 2400 laser scanner, taking around 50 separate scans, collectively containing approximately 25 million individual three dimensional points. Visit http://169.229.138.138/tambo/index.htm for further information.

The initial focus was on a complex of approximately 100 by 150m in size, and is the complex at the top right of the above photograph, and shown in the figure below. It contains over twenty separate rooms. FarField Technology's FastRBF™ engine was used to loft surfaces over the point data, and surfaces for two of these rooms, the so-called upper room and lower room, are viewable as VRML-models at http://169.229.138.138/tambo/vrmlframe.htm.

Says John Ristevski, from the Center for Design Visualization, "FastRBF provides an efficient and robust alternative for processing laser scan data. It's ability to remove small holes and interpolate between areas of missing or deficient data is superior to other software packages on the market".