Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By Mick Meaney
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

CyArk Wants to Digitally Preserve 500 Heritage Sites In Just Five Years

Friday, November 8, 2013 16:09

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Hypogeum

An engineer and entrepreneur creates a project to digitally preserve 500 heritage sites in 5 years.

via Gizmodo

Imagine creating a 3D digital archive of 500 of the world’s most at-risk heritage sites, preserved in virtual reality so that future generations can explore them in detail for centuries to come. That’s exactly what the CyArk 500 Challenge hopes to achieve—and it’s set itself the ambitious target of doing it in just five years.

Ancient Origins

The brainchild of Ben Kacyra, an Iraqi-born engineer and entrepreneur, the project, which will officially launch at a conference in London on Monday 22 October, aims to digitize the world’s most significant physical heritage sites. “I grew up in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, and when I was a little child my father would take me by the hand to the Gates of of Nineveh,” Kacyra explained to Gizmodo. “When the Taliban dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, I realized the same thing could happen to Nineveh—or any other heritage site. And it needn’t be destruction by man, but by natural disasters or erosion.” That was enough to convince him to strike out and start preserving these ancient sites in glorious 3D detail.

Fortunately, he was well-placed to do so. Kacyra, with a background in design, engineering and construction, developed some of the first portable 3D laser-scanning systems with his company, Cyra Technologies, back in 1993. Born out of a need to automate measurement for complex construction projects, they used time-of-flight scanning: the device shoots out a laser pulse and measures the time it takes for it to travel to a surface, bounce off it, and return to the scanner. By scanning in all directions, collecting millions of measurements, it’s possible to generate renderings of entire spaces which are accurate to within millimeters. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t just used for construction, but also became popular in the film and video game industries.

With that knowledge and technical ability in place, Kacyra set up CyArk in 2003 with his wife, Barbara, to digitally preserve cultural heritage sites. Ten years on, and the organization has successfully captured over 100 sites, including the cave dwellings of the Anasazi people in Colorado, Egyptian tombs, the ruins of Pompeii, the Mayan temples in Guatemala, the Tutuveni Hopi Petroglyphs and the Hindu temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Their model sees them build partnerships with other parties interested in acquiring the data—from universities to UNESCO. CyArk then provides the hardware, while the partners provide the manpower.

The Future of the Past

Over the last ten years, the technology has come on in leaps and bounds. “The original systems we big hunks of things that had to be lugged in the field, plus they were slow and expensive,” explains Kacyra. “Now they’re compact, much faster, higher resolution, and cheaper.” But a decade doesn’t just bring incremental changes—it brings complete paradigm shifts, too.