Can you imagine what your living place used to be? Recently, a 3D video that unfolds the past and present of Chongqing's Hualong Bridge area caught people's eyes, being reposted and hailed as an "aerial video" by some self-media.

The video, called Shadow into Mirror, unfolds the past and present of Chongqing's Hualong Bridge area based on 3D technology through many stories, such as the origin of Fotu Pass (also known as Futu Pass), Jiangzhou's garrison commander Li Yan's city-building history at Fotu Pass in the Three Kingdoms period, Chongqing Bombing during the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, and the appearance of Hualong Bridge in the new era, enabling people to rediscover a different Hualong Bridge and creating a feast for people's eyes.

Chen Hui is one of the creators of the video, also a post-80s architect. He was born and raised in Sichuan, but he came to Chongqing for university study in 2003 and has lived in Chongqing for more than ten years. Chen's team is made up of freelance architects, urban planners, and tech start-ups with shared interests and research. The team members have great enthusiasm for the information analytic expression about cities and buildings, which is not only a desire to express their specialties but also a consistent assumption and exploration of the intelligent application required by the smart city in the future.

Chen said their work was initially called Heaven and Earth, a video with the same technical style. Later, an urban planner joined their team. The urban planner had conducted detailed investigations through walking and patrolling in the Hualong Bridge area, collecting, sorting, and even researching a bulk of related data. At that time, invited by the 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), the design and construction of Chongqing's footpath system are proceeding smoothly in Yuzhong District, providing more contents to the team's work, so the video Shadow into Mirror was created.

The team focused on technical research while making Heaven and Earth but eyed content planning and graphic material design in the process of making Shadow into Mirror, Chen said. After thorough deliberation about the final expression, the team decided to integrate drone aerial photos, 3D scenes reconstructed through photogrammetry and programming dynamic graphics to create an augmented reality animation, Chen said, adding that their idea was to combine the distinctive landforms of Hualong Bridge area with the different city appearances of Chongqing in different periods, to form a series of dynamic, in-depth digital analysis and prospects that covers a millennial history.

"Our work received positive remarks from both the society and the industry," Chen said, indicating that the video is a final epitome of all team members' work, behind which is a 3D information model integrating multi-aspect information. Such a model can be used for a variety of work, such as video making, architecture, and environment design, and urban science research, so there must be more chances to build new models like that and improve them; with newfound knowledge, the models will produce more fruits and help more people know about Chongqing from different perspectives, Chen concluded.