Digital depot may archive world culture in 3-D

The system planned for the undertaking is dubbed 3-D-COFORM. It should provide the platform into which humanity's most important treasures, reflecting thousands of years of cultural development, can be gathered in one online archive for easy access.

Work is already underway to store images of thousands of statues, temple fragments and artworks. As part of the archive, it will be possible to enjoy them, either on a computer screen, or in a museum or depot.

“If enough partners join up, there could be millions of exhibits in our database when we're done,” says Andre Stork, who is coordinating the German side of the project at the IGD Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research.

The head of industrial applications, he and his team began working on the project's software infrastructure at the end of 2008.

However, it wasn't until last November that the team got its first virtual 3-D piece of art online: a true-to-the-original replica of Michelangelo's David.

“We want to turn to Egypt's Sphinx or some of the buildings of the Roman Forum next,” said Stork.

Stork and his colleagues hope their project will provide a boost to their peers in art history and archaeology around the world. For example, once 3-D-COFORM's data set is big enough, it will make it much easier to run comparisons on objects gathering dust in storehouses.

An online archive will also help curators and restorers, since documenting works by looking at their online copies will mean that the originals are spared from handling and potential damage.

But there's a lot of work to be done before the digital copies can rotate serenely on a scientist's screen. “With a photo-based process, we compress multiple pictures of the object, step-by-step, which when put together, match up to its dimensions,” says Sebastian Pena Serna, a scientific assistant at the Fraunhofer Institute.

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