Faith meets future: How AI digital twins are helping preserve churches, temples, and mosques
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Early this month, the seat of the Roman Catholic church--the Vatican, which has been blending tradition with science and cutting-edge tech for decades, unveiled an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital twin of St.
Peter's Basilica—a more than 400-year-old masterpiece of Renaissance and Baroque architecture that took over 100 years to complete. The twin, developed in just a month in partnership with Microsoft and a Paris-based digital preservation company, Iconem, will provide millions worldwide with an immersive virtual experience of the Basilica.
While Iconem used multiple devices,including drones, 3D cameras, and lasers to capture more than 400,000 high-resolution images of the Basilica, the data was securely backed up and stored on Microsoft's Azure Cloud. Microsoft’s AI tools refined the digital twin, producing a 3D representation accurate to the millimeter, and also used AI to help detect and map structural vulnerabilities like cracks and missing mosaic tiles.
Digital twins or virtual representations of physical entities like manufacturing plants, buildings, temples, churches, mosques, or heritage sites, have been created over the last two decades using technologies like light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanning, 3D mapping, and photogrammetry–the process of capturing images and stitching them together to build 3D models. Heritage Building Information Modelling (H-BIM) enhances digital twins by providing accurate 3D models.
For instance, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTCI) and Tata Trusts partnered with the Archaelogical Survey of India (ASI) for over a decade to restore Delhi’s Humayun Tomb and Nizamuddin Basti using laser scanners and 3D mapping. The ministry of
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