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Virtual Reality Exploration Of World Heritage Sites: Shaping The Future Of Travel

The concept is called the Open Heritage project, and it includes a collaboration between Google and a California-based nonprofit company, CyArk. The experiment started 15 years ago with CyArk's goal of wanting to create a permanent record of ancient locations under threat of natural events or desecration.

This project has created online 3D models of 26 heritage places in 18 countries. Some of which are:

• The 1000-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas Temple of Kukulcan in the Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico. According to a digital archaeologist, Chance Coughenour, this monument is one of the few circular structures discovered in the Mayan ruins. The Mayans, previously, had developed skills to study the sun, sunsets, sunrise, the Equinox, and the stars, so this structure has been believed to express spiritual evolution.
• The Roman city of Pompeii, buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
• The Native American cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in southern Colorado.
• The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin built in the 18th century.
• The Chavín de Huántar, a pre-Inca religious site, in north-central Peru. This structure is situated at an elevation of almost 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). This place does not attract many tourists because of its low accessibility, but the site is indeed incredible.
• The 1500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas. This record was created in 2001 by CyArk’s founder, Ben Kacyra, an expatriate Iraqi engineer who now lives in California.
• Bagan in Myanmar in 2016. The place has ancient Buddhist temples, which were damaged by a massive earthquake. One of these temples has been closed to visitors. However, the VR equipment can easily give access to enthusiasts.

The plan is to add more locations in the next few months. Some of them are the Washington Monument and the World War I battleground at Flanders Fields in Belgium.

Virtual Reality at its Peak

One of the main advantages, in the fields of virtual, augmented and mixed realities is the complete virtual reconstruction of 3D environments, especially buildings in full detail. Even if the buildings of interest are physically damaged, they can be virtually reconstructed through probabilistic approximations.

Since 2003, CyArk has created more than 200 heritage sites, with the help of digital cameras, aerial drones and LIDAR, a 3D laser scanning equipment for light detection and ranging.

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