Bartlett Summer Show 2010 3D Scan from ScanLAB on Vimeo.The Bartlett School of Architecture's summer show last year showcased the work of its students in all new dimensions. Matthew Shaw and William Trossell launched ScanLAB Projects with the aim of devising new ways of scanning buildings that makes the designs come to life and attempts to locate the viewer within the spatial environment of the structure. Instead of just producing data images, ScanLAB can practically recreate 3D snapshots in time. Using a 3D lazer scanner, can go beyond the usual static aerial views of spaces to give us an entire labyrinthian world to wander through—traveling up the stairs, around objects, through walls, above rooms and down corridors. Like an architectural version of Google Street View, the all-seeing 3D camera eye captures and faithfully recreates everything in its path—even people caught on camera are recorded with enough detail for recognition.The series of scans on ScanLAB's page show the development and variations of their still nascent techniques, creating effects that swing between mathematical graphs, phantasmal half-worlds and rather solid plains of existence. Their scanner is not only capable of clearly scanning bio matter, but also the density of all materials, ranging from deep walls to thin sheets of metal. They’ve even gone so far as to scan smoke and mist, as they did last year in an experiment towards Trossell's final year piece Slow Becoming Delightful. The piece was designed to “draw attention to the magical properties of weather events” that slowly unfold over time, and for as much as it appears to be vastly different from their previous architectural focuses, it may well be a lean towards our future. Architects such as Philippe Rahm have already started experimenting in creating buildings without material walls, replaced by microclimates focusing on various factors such as air pressure and evaporation. Even still, this level of detail achieved by ScanLAB Projects could give us interesting information about how a climate can affect a building in ways that have not been previously explored.ScanLAB Project's focus is broader than just scanning spaces to see if they match the original plans, a lot of their work is an important and realistic documentation of specific events, immortalizing them with a special clarity that most other media are still struggling to achieve.