Hello, today we would like to share a few ways to experience destroyed monuments in 3D

environments. The results you will see are the product of an experimental graduate seminar and
therefore we should also say that the work is very preliminary. Our aim was to provide ideas and
alternatives instead of a polished, finished product. We also wanted to show that as historians and
archaeologists, one must not be a technology expert to create immersive, meaningful, and completely
cost-free environments in 3D.

Three-dimensional modelling is today the primary digital tool to engage with cultural heritage in an
immersive, experiential manner. Click In the field of heritage, 3D technologies have become even
more relevant when they replicate monuments that no longer exist or that have been severely
damaged.
Click Photogrammetry tends to be the preferred technology to recreate monuments
that no longer exist. But there are other ways, some of which we explore in this presentation.
So our presentation closely follows Dr. Patrick Michael’s questions and results:
different ways to engage with monuments that no longer are.

Click The creative ways in which one can still experience and learn from destroyed monuments is
exemplified by three case-studies of destroyed or damaged heritage sites, each directed by a specific
technology: (Click 3 times) the Bosra theatre and photogrammetry; the Bamiyan archaeological
landscape in an interactive virtual museum; and motion tracking of videos of the Great Mosque of
Aleppo. We propose that, although photogrammetry provides an extremely useful tool in modelling
the physical appearance of monuments with precision and accuracy, it has severe limitations when it
comes to destroyed monuments that were poorly documented or for which documentation is not freely
available. Alternatively, interactive game engines and video tracking offer less-explored ways of
creating meaningful three-dimensional experiences of destroyed sites, emphasizing other values
beyond the architectural or scientific.

In other words, our question is:

Click If a destroyed cultural object cannot be reconstructed using photogrammetry, in which
ways can we still provide a meaningful communication platform via digital humanities which
accords with its diverse values?

2. Cultural heritage and values

Click The groundwork for any digital humanities project begins with a deliberation of its potential
impact.
Click First, the question of stakeholders, or in other words, who does the project benefit?
We have recognized five major groups of stakeholders when it comes to the digital
reconstruction of destroyed monuments, CLICK which are the local community and the general
public (participant especially via the Internet), researchers and students, states, and cultural heritage
organizations. The experiences we propose would be specifically catered to the general public and
students; we think.

Click, click, Second, does the value of the monument transpire in the revival of the reconstruction that
is proposed?
The Value of cultural heritage, as legally defined, mainly comes from the laws and
conventions put forward by international organizations, particularly the UNESCO Cultural section,
ICOM, ICOMOS and ICCROM. In 1972, UNESCO recognized five types of value inherent in
cultural heritage: (Click): historical, scientific, artistic, commemorative, and aesthetic. This
understanding of value has evolved with several other international documents, including the Nara
Document, and the Operational guidelines revisions of 1992 and 2001. Combined, they extended the
value of cultural heritage to its cultural landscape, social memory, and all other intangible significance
attached.

Click Click This extended definition of value – recognizing the inseparability of its tangible
and intangible dimensions - can be especially conveyed through digital humanities, where one can
carefully curate immersive and multi-layered experiences.

3. Methodology

Click The creation of 3D models of monuments that no longer exist involves a particular set of
questions and restrictions.

The first regards the acquirement of the data used in three dimensional experiences. Naturally,
because the monument is no longer available, one must rely entirely on existing information, either
in the form of photographs, drawings, or videos. Sites that were never studied or recorded in any
format stand very little chance of being adequate candidates for this sort of in-depth experiment.

Click We were also committed to engage with open sourced data exclusively. This self-imposed
limitation was to demonstrate that almost anyone (given time and resources) is capable of creating a
three-dimensional experience solely by using what is available on the internet - this includes
archaeologists and historians without much technical experience. Three-dimensional technologies are
often associated with the “democratization” (QUOTE) and “shareability” of knowledge, and we have
tried to promulgate this pattern.

Click Finally, we decided to limit our exercise to monuments that have been destroyed during
episodes of modern warfare, terrorism, and other forms of conflict (as opposed to monuments
that simply have faded away). The reason for this is simple: the violent destruction of monuments
ironically creates a window of awareness for people to learn more about them. Bamiyan is an
excellent example, since it was not a topic of much public attention until its destruction by the
Taliban. Another benefit of this focus is to shift our attention to the constant destruction of
archaeological sites and to engage more directly with the roles that we must play as protectors of the
ancient world.

We would like to be in line with other experimental digital humanities approaches that engage with
3D modelling and programming in cultural heritage, such as the ones we have heard about today. As
Garstki suggests, “The creation of a new representation of the artifacts provides a new dimension to
our interactions with these artifacts...” (Garstki 2016:1).

4. Photogrammetry

Click So, Photogrammetry is frequently used to create three-dimensional models of destroyed sites.
The most notable example of this was accomplished in 2016 by Wahbeh, Nebiker and Fangi (2016),
who were able to combine professional and touristic imagery of the Temple of Bel at Palmyra to build
a 3D model of the temple before it was destroyed. Agisoft Photoscan (now Agisoft Metahsape) tends
to be the software used for these sort of approaches.

Metashape provides a robust and automated software to create 3D models, but its efficacy is impaired
by the parameters of the dataset. Open source data is not ideal as the main support for the creation of
3D models in Metashape, since there is a lot of variability between each picture used to recreate the
mosaic, the orthophoto, that will produce the 3D model. If the software does not find enough common
points on each picture, it will not be able to stich them together.

Click Here we present two examples, one moderately successful and the other unsuccessful. The
results changed due to the quality and number of pictures available.
 On the top you can see the Bosra Theatre, in its original state before it was damaged
in 2013 during the Syrian Civil War, and on the bottom, the largest of the Bamiyan Buddhas,
now completely gone. The model of the Bamiyan Buddha came out as a 2D collage, since
most pictures online were from the front of the monument. This did not come as a surprise, as
previous attempts to model the Buddha, notably by Higuchi and Barnes in 1995, had already
tested the difficulty of creating a 3D model of the Buddha using photogrammetry.

Although the Bosra theatre is an encouraging example, the inertia of these models and the low rate of
success using open-sourced photos, made us question the overall feasibility of relying on
photogrammetry as our sole platform to bring destroyed cultural heritage back to life. So we began
exploring alternative methods through which we could revive the experience and value of destroyed
cultural heritage without a successful 3D model of the monument itself.

5. Multi-integration of 3D modelling methods in game engine

Click We choose an interactive game engine as the first alternative to photogrammetry. For those who
are not familiar with game engines, these platforms lay the software framework to build and create
web-based interactive environment for public users. Among many free, open-source platforms to
create an interactive game, we chose PlayCanvas, a web-based platform relatively friendly to
beginners.

Under the limitations of file size and operating systems imposed by PlayCanvas in free mode, we
created an interactive virtual museum to promote a personal, guided experience of the Bamiyan
valley. We chose Bamiyan, where at least two of the largest rock carved buddhas were destroyed by
Taliban in 2001, as our first case study because we wanted to explore how to convey the "outstanding
universal value" of a damaged archaeological landscape and its monuments without trying to
reconstruct piece by piece what was lost.

Click The virtual museum is essentially a multiplayer “game” which leads the visitor on a tour. The
layout of the museum is based on a 1928 plan of the Western Buddha niche and its associated caves.
Thus, each room represents a cave that physically exists, which hopefully invokes an historical
consciousness that these caves were actively used for centuries.

We set the timeline of this virtual museum in reverse – starting in the present events. We wished to
link each room with the question: does physical destruction or neglection determine effective loss?
The rooms in the game incorporate 2D and 3D media that was imported from Sketch-up, Blender,
Youtube, StetchFab, and images from the web. Some of the material was modelled by us, but most
came from public sources.

Click
Click on video In room 1 and 2, which represents the modern period, we imported images of
newspaper articles, a model of the Bamiyan Buddha after its destruction, and a video published by
UNESCO. Here, the point is to reveal that the destruction of the Buddha in 2001 propelled an
enormous wave of scholarship and public attention. It is worth noting, for example, that Bamiyan was
inscribed in the World Heritage List only in 2003, confirming the “outstanding universal value” of its
cultural landscape even without the physical existence of the monumental Buddhas.

Click on Video Based on the preliminary understanding that loss does not necessary curtail value, we
wanted to encourage players to rethink the relation between the remaining landscape and the
destroyed Buddha statues. For centuries, the value of the Bamiyan landscape was attached to the
monumental Buddhas and did not consider the surrounding environment. Room 3 and 4 represent this
time period between 18th century to 2001 when European travellers rediscovered and recorded
Bamiyan. Through their photos and drawings, imported as image texture, we see the privileging of
some monuments over others at Bamiyan.

Click
Click on video Room 5, a maze room, represents the period between 12th and 18th century, when few
mentions of Bamiyan exist in written sources. Here again, we encourage players to think whether a
perceived “Dark Age" means that heritage disappears, at least in a sense.

Click on video Room 6 and 7 focus on the caves surrounding the buddha niche. These caves were
probably the rooms of pilgrims in antiquity. All of them were richly decorated and often used, so we
imported image and video textures of wall paintings to reconstruct a realistic scene a Bamiyan cave in
the second half of the 1st millennium CE.

Finishing the tour, players may sense that it is the whole cultural landscape of the Bamiyan valley,
including the destroyed Buddhas, that makes up the authenticity and integrity of this cultural heritage.
They have gained an understanding about the historical context of the monumental Western Buddha,
and have engaged with different aspects of its history and value.

6. Video tracking
Click The second three-dimensional technology we experimented was motion tracking. This
technology was chosen in order to curate a virtual tour of a partially destroyed site - The Great
Mosque of Aleppo -, which has received much attention since the beginning of the Syrian War and
now acquires an almost symbolic status as an innocent fatality of war.

Click Motion tracking is a technology that takes a video and essentially recreates the movement of the
camera, thus creating a 3D space from a 2D video – it accomplishes this by tracking common points
from frame to frame. Blender is a very versatile software that allows to both 3D model a monument
and to recreate the motion path of a camera in a video. By creating a 3D space, motion tracking also
allows for 3D elements to be added to the video itself, as if it was part of the original recording. This
is a technique often used for visual effects in cinematic spheres.

Our main objective was to use motion tracking to curate a guided tour through the rubble and
destruction of the Mosque, with allusions to its history and resilience; a virtual tour that is somewhere
between a museum experience and a short documentary.

Click So how did we accomplish this?

Here is where I ask you to put on your 3d glasses, and maybe share them with the people
around if there are not enough.

Click We placed media and text in videos recorded in the Great Mosque of Aleppo after its
destruction. The overlay of pictures, sound, and text on top of videos showing the mosque after it was
destroyed were meant to create a stark contrast between pre and post destruction. Also, text and
images in 3D anaglyph mode (the famous stereoscopic 3D effect that uses red and cyan for each eye – which you can
experience with the glasses) add to the actual dimension of space, as if the text and images
themselves, displaying and retelling the story of the monument, were a visible, integral part of its
existence.

In this sense, motion tracking allowed for different historic moments or valuable aspects of a
monument to be highlighted. In the case of the Aleppo mosque - we wanted to focus on the resilience
of this monument despite destruction. This aspect would have been something intrinsic to the
visitor experience prior to 2012, but it is easy to dismiss resilience as one stands on a pile of rubble.

Click To highlight the current state of abandonment and destruction of the mosque, we placed pictures
of the mosque pre-2012 in anaglyph (3D) mode next to the elements they depicted post 2012.
Click But we also wanted to press that this had happened before. The anaglyph 3D text, which
provides a narrative for the video tour, highlights previous episodes of the destruction of the mosque,
including the fire of 1159 CE and the Mongol razing of 1260 CE.
This particular text is shown as the camera enters the courtyard of the mosque and shows the
debris organized for reconstruction. Again, this contrast is meant to allude to the resilience of some
monuments despite time and war.

Click Taken from a 3D reconstruction by Wahbeh and Nebiker using public and professional imagery,
a picture of the reconstructed minaret, once the most imposing part of the mosque, was placed in situ
to create an illusion of where the minaret once stood. This was achieved by placing a cropped image
of the minaret close to the tracking points that marked that particular corner of the courtyard. This
view of the mosque as it was perhaps also shows how the mosque will be in the future, considering
the current interest in rebuilding the minaret.

Perhaps also alluding to the mosque’s future, we added background sound from an open-sourced
videos recorded in the mosque when it was in use (from Lorenzo Manenti 2009), showcasing a
reading of the Koran with the background noise of people moving in the courtyard of the mosque. The
sound was added to increase the immersive experience of the tour and to complement the viewing of
the video. It contrasted with the images of destruction and the emptiness of the courtyard. The reading
of the Koran transports the viewer to the sacred elements of this monument and how it was used for
centuries, with frequent interruptions by conflict and war..

7. Conclusion
Click In conclusion, we would like to propose that the tools and possibilities for creating three
dimensional experiences of sites destroyed or damaged in modern conflict go far beyond
photogrammetry. In this case, game engines and video tracking appear to be effective conveyors of
the immense value of cultural heritage, its preservation, and its continued impact upon human
experience – even after the monuments have disappeared. We hope this exercise can serve as a
modest incentive to induce more creativity in the field of digital humanities and encourage a broader
exploration of what makes up the integrity and authenticity of its value, a large portion of which may
exist beyond the tangible level. Finally, and more importantly, we believe that the physical
disappearance of an ancient monument should not be the end of its story.