Use of technology can change the way we study heritage

How technology is changing landscape of cultural heritage

Preservation/restoration of cultural heritage, passing on priceless valuable assets to our future generations, is one of the most important missions for our current generation. Cultural heritage, however, is lost day-by-day in natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as man-made disasters such as arson and mischief. Against the loss, traditionally, physical preservation/restoration efforts have been made to save/to reconstruct them physically. In parallel with these physical efforts, new digital preservation/restoration methods have been developed to preserve/ to restore them digitally in virtual space by using the recent advanced electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) technologies. We have been carrying out digital preservation/restoration projects to record/to recover geometric and photometric information of various heritage sites. We refer this project as e-heritage project.

We conducted, as a part of our e-heritage project, the mission to digitize archeological sites of Angkor Dynasty in Cambodia. Even though physical preservation/restoration efforts have been made by many UNESCO teams in Cambodia, damage is still progressing day-by-day because of heavy rainfall and sever sunshine peculiar to the rain forest climate. For example, at Bayon temple, the central tower leans year after year, and even the possibility of collapse is whispered. Digital preservation of its current shape by using the recent advanced e-heritage techniques is in urgent necessity. Due to that, we have digitized Bayon temple, Angkor Wat temple, Preah Vihear temple and other sites in Cambodia.

The e-heritage project also provides the strong driving force of development of cutting-edge EECS technologies. As necessity is said to be the mother of invention, existence of difficult-scanning area and the data size of those temples challenges us and pushes the advancement of EECS technologies. For example, Bayon temple, a complex structure with many difficult portions for the digitization of using commercially available sensors, such as many high towers and hidden colliders, requires us to develop various peculiar sensors, such as a balloon sensor, a laser sensor hanged under a balloon for scanning the top of those high towers, and a climbing sensor, which climbs up and down along a ladder to efficiently scanning narrow colliders. The size of the temple, 150m X 150m x 40m, resulting huge size of the acquired data, prevents from the use of existing data processing pipelines and pushes us to develop our own software to handle large-scale data simultaneously in parallel manner, running on the supercomputer of the University of Tokyo. Although these sensors and software are developed for digitizing this temple, we can also utilize them in different applications such as 3D map-making, remote-sensing and autonomous driving.

e-heritage promotes history educations and heritage-site tourisms. In Kyushu Island, Japan, many decorative tumuli with mural paintings exist, of which presence few people know. This low profile of the tumuli is partly because most of them are closed to public from the fear that their painting color might be deteriorated due to CO2 emission by incoming human visitors, if open to public. To remedy this issue, Kyushu National Museum decided to create their video contents and asked us to digitize them. Created video contents from the acquired data have been displayed at Kyushu National Museum as their permanent collections, which help the promotion of visiting the museum as well as visiting the original sites, even though they are closed. Those video contents, also uploaded to the cloud computer, can be downloaded at home and enjoyed by user’s smartphone screens by scanning the 2D barcodes printed in our commentary book on the tumuli published in parallel. Further, our team developed a MR system, with MR goggles, that not only superimpose ancient buildings but also allows to watch past events occurring in movie superimposed on the real archaeological site.