How Google is helping preserve the world’s most important places

The world watched in despair on Monday as fire engulfed one of the western world’s most treasured landmarks, Notre Dame. 

The cause of the fire is still unknown, but a disaster like this is not unprecedented. Thanks to climate change, armed conflict, development, and human action, threats to historical places are all too common. 

Surprisingly, one of the best ways to prepare for those threats is not just structural re-enforcements or other physical defensive measures, but technology.

On Thursday, Google Arts & Culture is celebrating World Heritage Day by expanding its Open Heritage project, which digitally preserves historical sites online. Open Heritage is an initiative launched last year in partnership with the organization CyArk that puts digital 3D renderings, virtual tours, and other data about historical sites, in an open source Google Arts & Culture portal.

Why create digital models of the real world? In these volatile times — when rising sea levels threaten to sink Venice, civil war results in the destruction of ancient Syrian landmarks and artifacts, and Notre Dame burns — creating detailed 3D renderings and blueprints of historical places can serve as an “insurance policy” for world history. 

These are essentially reverse-engineered blueprints that can enable the accurate care, repair, and restoration of intricate and unique places. The renderings can also, in the event of disaster, allow people to digitally explore an amazing landmark as it once was. 

“In the case of a catastrophic event, just having some blueprints to work from that are derived from the 3D data can be a really valuable starting point,” John Ristevski, CyArk’s founder, said. “It can also provide a strong sense of place, and the sense of wonder that you might have gotten.”

Last April, Google Arts & Culture launched its Open Heritage project with CyArk. CyArk is an organization founded to “capture, archive, and share the world’s cultural heritage.” On Thursday, Google is expanding the initiative by adding 30 more historical sites to the portal (up from 26 last year), both from CyArk and two new partners: Historic Environment Scotland and the digital preservation team of the University of South Florida. 

Goole is also announcing the Open Heritage Alliance, which unites leaders in the space to consolidate digital preservation in one place online, Open Heritage 3D. 

“Building on our collaboration with CyArk last year in the initial vision of Open Heritage, this year we’re excited to showcase the stories of more heritage locations with more institutions on Google Arts & Culture and make the source 3D data easily accessible,” Chance Coughenour, the program manager at Google Arts & Culture, told Mashable. 

“This project offers a way for anyone, anywhere to learn how people around the world are working to digitally document and share our shared global history.”

In 2003, the percentage of threatened world heritage sites reached an all time high at 5 percent. That percentage holds today, as additional threatened sites were added to UNESCO’s endangered list, In its most recent report, UNESCO classified 54 of 1,092 world heritage sites as “in danger.” That imbues the work of digital preservationists with a sense of urgency. 

Digital preservation works by layering extremely high resolution photos on top of 3D scans captured by a laser measurement system called LIDAR. Using a LIDAR sensor enables preservationists to construct a 3D rendering that is accurate down to the millimeter. 

The LIDAR scans and renderings of already impacted sites will now be included in the Open Heritage portal. 

After a 2017 earthquake damaged the Mexico City Cathedral & Palace of Fine Arts, it asked CyArk to come in and document the site in case of a future disaster. CyArk flew a drone inside the cathedral to capture the nooks, crannies, and intricate artistry of a historical structure that’s already seen damage, and that the government wants to protect.

“We have these relationships with different governments around the world, and we listen for them to tell us where they need help,” Ristevski said.

CyArk has given the data it captured to the Mexican government, but it also lives in the Open Heritage Portal for everyone to explore.

In the United States, the National Parks Service is concerned about a mysterious biofilm that’s increasingly covering the dome of the Jefferson Monument. It asked CyArk to document the spread of the substance so they could even just get a clear picture of what they’re dealing with. 

CyArk would usually use a drone for this kind of work, but National Mall flight restrictions required that they borrow the NPS’ helicopter to cruise around the monument and take ultra high resolution photos and scans from the sky.

One of Google’s new partners, the University of South Florida (USF), is working to digitally preserve the Apollo 1 Memorial at Cape Canaveral. Dr. Lori Collins, the co-director of the Alliance for Integrated Spatial Technologies at USF, and her team, are spatially documenting many early NASA missions at Cape Canaveral, now under threat from erosion and natural disaster. 

“We’re having a lot of issues with climate change, coastal storm impacts, hurricane damage, and they’re threatened from all of that,” Dr. Lori Collins, co-director of the Alliance for Integrated Spatial Technologies at USF, said. “This is history in our backyard that has great significance to the nation, and is in our recent past, yet it is facing a lot of the same problems that heritage is facing globally.”

According to Ristevski, another organization captured scans of Notre Dame in 2010. Ristevski says those scans will likely play a part in its restoration. But documenting the damage as it is now will also probably come into play.

“You can imagine now, from the scans that they took of Notre Dame, now they might be able to use that as a guide book on how to reconstruct it,” Ristevski said.

Another problem the Open Heritage Alliance aims to solve is the consolidation of all of this data. CyArk and USF are not the only organizations capturing this data. But right now, there is no central hub for digital preservation, so it may be difficult to locate archives in the event of an emergency. Open Heritage 3D would solve that problem by serving as a repository for the world’s 3D historical data.

“Part of our mission deals with making sure that data and information is readily accessible and is preserved in such a way that the content is discoverable, and able to be dealt with in ways that will persist through time,” Collins said. “Having this open heritage platform, and all of the google tools, just makes it much more broadly approachable and accessible.”

Further, part of CyArk’s mission is training others to use DSLR and LIDAR equipment to capture their own records. Some of the new site data comes from historical sites in Damascus, Syria. CyArk trained young professionals with the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums in Lebanon to document their heritage, as the war in Syria has affected and damaged many sacred and historical sites across the country. It is CyArk’s hope that many more individuals will be able to capture and upload the data to one central database. 

All of the data on the Open Heritage site is open source. Google, CyArk, and USF hope that researchers will continue to plumb their work to create new educational experiences, like VR, and learn more about the historical sites.

Aside from use of the data by governments and historical societies, the Open Heritage project has a role to play for the public. On the Open Heritage portal, users can find multimedia digital tours of far flung ancient temples and or cliffside caves. Of course, even with advances in VR, digitally exploring a site is no substitution for the real thing. But with the volatility of the physical world, as Notre Dame showed this week, the digital one can offer not just a safety net, but a glimpse into history, too.