Heritage is about more than monuments. It is also about people: how they interacted with the buildings in daily life and how their sense of belonging has shaped them. This is why organisations such as UNESCO were established to protect the world’s cultural heritage from damage through natural disaster, neglect, vandalism, and human conflict.
One way to preserve monuments is to record them digitally, using specialist laser scans, to create 3D models. This is what the Curious Travellers Project does, using a resource that exists in abundance: the curiosity of millions of tourists and locals worldwide, who take photographs of what they see in the world around them.
We then augment these crowdsourced images – from digital cameras or scans of photographs, slides, and negatives – with data that is available free online and from social media sites to create 3D models of ancient monuments and sites, producing accurate representations without artificial or artistic reconstructions. Importantly, the project is more than just the 3D content. By using geospatial and archaeological data that describes the site within its landscape, its context is included, providing a lasting legacy that contributes to local historical environment records.
