Crowdsourcing the Reconstruction of Lost Heritage
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:21
I've been told to talk loud, so if you need me to actually quiet down, I can do that as well. If you need me to speak slower, I can do that as well, but when I get really excited about something, I tend to really get moving. So we're going to talk about a project that Chance and I have been working on
00:40
for just over a year now, something that we're really excited to be able to present here today. Usually when Chance and I are presenting this at a conference, it's to a bunch of archeologists. It's a kind of a different atmosphere. People are thinking about some different questions, some different thoughts. So we're really excited to be in front of, for the first time, a totally new audience
01:02
and get some feedback, get some thoughts, and maybe even help us think about some new directions that a project like this can go in. The two of us are the founders of the project. I am a, well, both of us are Marie Curie Fellows. We are researching in two different institutions. I'm at the University of Murcia,
01:20
that's in the south of Spain, near Alicante, because no one ever knows where Murcia's at, but it's a great place. And Chance is at the University of Stuttgart in the Institute for Photogrammetry. We also have some people that we really just want to thank publicly, because they have been key to making this project work for us. Fabio Remondino, you may have heard of him before.
01:41
He worked on the virtual restorations of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan over a decade now. And then my personal advisors from the University of Murcia, both Victor and Mariano, and Chance's advisor, Dieter Fritsch, from the University of Stuttgart. In addition, we have had support
02:01
from a lot of other great centers out there. The Iraqi Ministry of Tourism has been on board with this, the Mosul Cultural Museum, or what is left of the personnel have been supportive of this. The newly formed Gilgamesh Center for the Protection of Heritage, and of course, the Unite for Heritage Initiative by UNESCO.
02:23
Now, the destruction of cultural heritage is unfortunately nothing new. These are actually recent examples. We could point out destruction has been happening for thousands and thousands of years. And it tends to be that whenever a new occupying force comes into a region, they will erase the past that has been there before
02:42
for their own ideology, whatever that might be. In some cases, it's erasing the faces of past kings and putting their own in place, making their story the history of the place that they've come into. But recent cases we could look at in the 16th century when the Spanish conquistadores came into Latin America.
03:03
To burn the Mayan codices was a way to erase the past of the Maya and replace it with whatever narrative they wished to put in at that time. Likewise, with the Bamiyan Buddhas, the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas was a way to remove the Buddhist past of that part of Afghanistan
03:20
and replace it with strictly an Islamic past. And then of course, most recently, we have the destruction of the Mosul Museum, which was a way to remove everything that was pre-Islamic of that area and even in some cases, remove specific parts of the Islamic history of the Mosul area
03:40
to replace it with their own interpretation. And most recently, of course, we have the occupation of Palmyra and the destruction of certain parts of Palmyra as well. And again, the same sort of thing, removing anything that wasn't part of their own interpretation of Islam. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you guys
04:02
a little bit how the web platform that we've created works. Chance is gonna talk about some of the other issues and some of the other results surrounding the project. But hopefully this will give you an idea of how it works and then once you know how it works, you can maybe think about that in context of what Chance will present. So the web application is pretty simple.
04:22
We basically have four steps that happens on this web. And I should emphasize here that this web application is completely open, open source from start to finish. If you wanna start your own project, you can do that. We have all the code up on GitHub. But if you're gonna start your own project, we'd much rather that you actually just contribute to the code base that we already have going
04:41
so that we can all benefit from it in the end. Four steps. So the first step is identifying lost heritage. So this means that anyone can log in. The only thing you have to do is create an account and that's pretty simple. You log in and you can drop a pin anywhere on a map where heritage has been destroyed. And of course that isn't restricted to the Middle East
05:03
or Nepal where we had that earthquake. That happens here in Europe as well. Oftentimes there are some places that just simply aren't protected heritage sites. You have vandalism, you have looting, you have theft that happens here in Europe, North America, all around the world. This is something that is a universal phenomenon
05:21
that we all face. Once a location has been identified, it opens it up for people to simply upload photos that they may have taken. So if you were a tourist in Mosul 10 years ago, unfortunately not many of us were, but if you were, you could upload your photos from the Mosul Museum and then those go
05:40
into photogrammetric reconstructions later on. Organization is probably one of the fundamental things that we need. Computers still aren't that good at doing the kind of pattern recognition that our brains can do in an instant. We can look at a group of pictures and we already know what belongs together. That takes a lot more resources to do on a computer and we simply don't have the money
06:01
to put into the sort of crowd source or crowd computing applications that would make that happen for us. But by having the human eyes dedicated to looking at images, finding images that belong together, grouping those together in some sort of logical way. North facade of the Temple of Bel and Palmyra, for example, all the images that someone sees in them.
06:23
Then that allows us to quickly download those, load those into some sort of photogrammetric software, Agisoft, Memento, end frames, whatever it might be, and that lets us then start producing the reality-based photorealistic models that we get from there. And then of course, step four is people are able to do
06:42
that sort of reconstructions on their own. Everything that's happening there is happening by people participating in the community. I should emphasize that the results from the site so far are primarily from members of the community, not from myself, not from Chance. So the web platform is completely open.
07:00
The moment someone uploads content to our website, it is accessible for the rest of the public. There is no blocking on that, there is no reviewing what that photo might be. Thankfully, we haven't had any issue with people loading dodgy content on there. It's all been great so far. But we don't believe in this idea that we are the gatekeepers
07:21
for the content that go on there. We let that be open and let the public decide. We can implement sort of Reddit ratings on there. People can upvote or downvote the content as they see fit for it and let that happen. So completely open source. It's also, I should point out, the first project to do crowdsourcing for Lost Heritage
07:44
that's out there right now. So the users are contributing the content, the pattern matching, the data processing, the narrative building. We have people who are constantly contacting us saying, hey, can we use this model? Can we do this, do that? And we always tell them, of course you can, it's completely open source.
08:00
We encourage everybody who does a reconstruction to release it under some sort of Creative Commons license. If it's a fully open one, even better. But basically, people are doing everything here. We have people creating their own exhibits from it. People creating applications. People doing all kinds of different uses with this on here. People even remixing some of the content.
08:22
We've had some interesting 3D versions of models come onto the site that people have done along the way. So this is what you see when you get to the homepage. You see a map with all the different sites on there. If you go up to the locations area, that lets you create a new pin. Otherwise, you can simply just click on any of those areas
08:41
and it takes you to one of the identified locations and shows you what we actually have in those areas. You get the, this is actually going to one of the locations. So we're now at the Palmira location. You see that there are several groupings already created there. We have the Temple of Bell,
09:00
which you could then go to and either upload more images directly to that grouping or you can simply dump a bunch of images to that location. So if you've been to Palmira, if you have digital photographs, you can take that entire load, just dump it straight there. They show up on the stack of unsorted images, which then volunteers can come in and start sorting into relative,
09:21
to related groups that belong to that. So you can see you can just drop those images directly into there. Once you come to one of the reconstructions, which you see right here, once you're in one of the reconstructions, then you have the option to either remove or add.
09:41
Removing doesn't remove it altogether from the site. It simply removes it from that group so that you're saying, well, actually, this belongs to another part of Palmira or whatever it might be. You can then also download the original images so that you can start processing those or do any sort of modeling that you wanna do based on those images. And then you're also presented with all of the images available at the site,
10:03
at that location, so you can choose what other images you might want to add from there at that point in time. Try again, okay, there we go. So in summary, what we're talking about here is that users are the ones creating and identifying the locations. It's a lot better for someone who's from a particular area
10:23
to be able to identify those sites of lost heritage, to be able to talk about it, than myself as a North American living in Europe. I can talk about Spain, I can talk about North America, but it's better for people with local knowledge to identify those sites or people who are willing to do the research on them.
10:40
Then uploading the photos, this is particularly useful for areas where we have a lot of those photographs. That's not everywhere, but where we can take any photo, really. Even the old scanned negatives or scanned slides can be useful for certain types of photogrammetric reconstruction. Users are doing the organization, grouping all of those photos together
11:01
into useful image categories. They're doing the processing, and those users are also retelling the story. A couple other things on the web platform. We also have just a basic site administration, so we have the content management system that admins or moderators could have access to,
11:20
so they can kind of help keep checks on the site as needed, but we've never needed to do that so far. There's a couple things that I wanna touch on before I pass this over to Chance on what we're looking forward to. The first thing that we actually have this implemented, but it's still too resource intensive and tends to crash our server very quickly.
11:41
We have a Flickr integration in place now, so wherever any of these sites are at, it will automatically fetch available license-free or open license photos on Flickr so that you can then just simply add those photos to any relevant grouping of photos that you want to. This means that we could already say that there are thousands or tens of thousands
12:02
or hundreds of thousands of photos available for a lot of these sites that already exist on the internet today. We don't need to send out new equipment to these areas, particularly areas where there's a conflict or danger for people. Those photographs are available. It's just a matter of finding them, identifying them,
12:20
and this is one way that we can do that by integrating with other existing platforms. The other things that we're trying to do now are increase the automation, so getting the sort of pre-matching of images, finding images that already share things together through computer vision. Quality control of user images, this isn't to say that we're filtering out good or bad, but it's things, images that have exif data,
12:43
images that have higher resolution. These sort of things are more useful for photogrammetry than an image that does not. So we're trying to come up with a way that we could say this is a five-star crowd-sourced image, this is a one-star crowd-sourced image. So people can automatically say, okay, well I want a grouping
13:00
of just five-star images that we do there. And then finally getting down to cloud-based photogrammetric solutions so that we can do this all automatically in the cloud. We're also working on a new visual experience right now, which Chance will talk about. And finally things like gamification, where people can kind of keep scores of the different things that they're doing on there,
13:20
have their personal dashboard so that they can see the kind of things that they're already working on, and user-curated virtual galleries so people can then retell the stories of heritage as they want to be able to do. So in summary, we've got the locations, we're working on the task and gamification, we already do have a 3D gallery in place, and using Sketchfab, users can already create collections
13:43
and tell stories as they want to do. We have an API that's already out there so people can consume the data that's on the website, it's all open, and we do have a Slack channel if people want to jump in there. It's half-active, some people talk a lot, we don't always have a regular community in there.
14:02
Chance. All right, test, test. Can everyone hear me? Yes, okay, we're on. Okay, so thank you very much, Matthew. I'm going to take a step back and give you some perspective to where this project began
14:21
and where it is today. So this project did begin as the term, it was named Project Mosul. Of course, the reason being, in late February of last year, many of us were heartbroken when we saw a video that went viral of members of the self-proclaimed Islamic State
14:42
destroying artifacts in the Mosul Museum. Matthew and I discussed it, we were talking about it, and trying to find a solution or something that we could do, and the idea sprung to mind, why don't we crowdsource reconstructions of these artifacts and put them back into a virtual museum where we can tell the story of what happened.
15:02
So in March 8th of last year, we did exactly that. So we actually had the website up and running within 10 days. And as a short timeline, so we have the destruction at the Mosul Museum, the launch of the project on the 8th.
15:20
We received probably 30, 40, 50, 60 images at the beginning, and we had no idea where this project was going to go, which is why it was just named Project Mosul at the beginning. But then after the earthquake occurred in April of last year in Nepal, we realized, wait, we don't have to do this only, this is perfectly applicable to any region in the world
15:43
where cultural heritage has been destroyed and it doesn't have to only be destroyed by man, it can be destroyed by earthquakes. So we actually have a full reconstruction of Durbar Square in Kathmandu from before and after the earthquake as a photogrammetric reconstruction. You can find that on our website. Then you have the destruction of Palmyra,
16:01
and later we were awarded the Innovation Award of 2015 by SCI-Arc. At the same time, we began to look into ways to actually put these artifacts, the virtual reconstructions, into a virtual museum. In the Economist Media Lab, the Economist Magazine,
16:23
they reached out to us and they said, we think we can build a virtual museum, could we take your data? And we said, of course you can take our data, this is what we want to do. We want to collaborate with anyone and everyone that wants to participate. So I'm going to show you some examples of that and it will be released within two weeks to the public.
16:41
Then I just returned from last Thursday, we had a museum event and the launch of even a new version of the front end as an interactive interface to our website. So these are some examples of the 3D reconstructions that you see that have been done. The ones that you see here will actually,
17:00
you will see them in the virtual museum that is released for Google Cardboard, Oculus, iOS, Android, it's all going to be free and it's all going to be out there for anyone. This is one of my particular favorites, this is the Nimrud, this is the entrance gate to Nimrud. If any of you happen to have been following the news, you would know that this entire site
17:21
has been either destroyed with dynamite or they used bulldozers to destroy. So this is actually one of my favorites because it's so large. This Lamassu that you see here to your right were enormous, enormous artifacts that you can see in the British Museum, they have examples there.
17:40
So as the project began as Project Mosul and then with Palmyra, the occupation of Palmyra and cultural heritage being destroyed in Nepal for example, we decided to take a global focus and with a global focus, you can see now that we have pins that volunteers have dropped pins on every continent, basically every continent
18:02
and so we are focusing on a global scale and promoting a positive narrative with digital preservation. That is one of our main focuses. So here's an example of Durbar Square in Nepal from before the earthquake in April of 2015 and if you keep your eye on the model
18:21
and it switches, that is after. Now of course, you're only looking at a still image because if you go to our website, you can rotate around that three-dimensional model, you can zoom, you can pan and you can click the before or after button to see that yourself. This is all integrated with Sketchfab of course. So we decided if we're going to expand our project
18:41
to a global scale, why don't we change our name and we did. So our project is called Requi which you saw on the program for today which is to recreate in the language of Esperanto and here you have a camera that's being put back together by multiple dots which is very similar with photogrammetry.
19:00
So some of the results are, we have a web-based platform, it's open source, building volunteer community, public 3D, 4D gallery and a network, a growing network of private and public partners as well as the media coverage that we have received is directly proportional to how many volunteers contribute to our project and how many images we receive.
19:23
For example, March and April, Mosul Museum. Last year, I believe the occupation of Palmyra happened in June. So you also see the number of images that are being uploaded is because it's being reported on in the news which is why we need you to spread the word because someone you may know
19:41
has been to one of these sites and they would like to contribute. So some examples, again the results, the first virtual museum application is due for public release and that is called Recover Mosul that will be released as I mentioned before. We are supported by the Iraqi Ministry of Tourism as well as UNESCO's Unite for Heritage
20:02
and one direction, actually one of the key directions for this project is the idea, the narrative, the discussion of what are we doing by generating this 3D content of lost heritage? It's a really good question. It's something that hasn't been discussed
20:22
in certain ways like we're doing here. So here you have a 360 degree render, an example of the virtual museum. This is the virtual museum. That is the model that was reconstructed with I believe 16 images that were only taken from one side because the line itself was positioned against a wall. So it's a partial reconstruction
20:41
placed into a virtual version of the museum. This application, the virtual museum, you can come and see it for yourself. We have a maker space tomorrow from 12.15 to 1.15 in the main hall. I recommend you come and you can check it out yourself with the headphones and listen and have the experience.
21:03
A very obviously what is also connected with digital reconstructions and if some of you have been following the news recently, you may have seen that some people are printing some of these objects. I actually have an example with me here. So the line of Mosul of course is very large
21:21
but you can also print it out very small. But what we can begin to do is we're beginning to go and make conversations about something that haven't been discussed before. For example, in this case, we have 3D printed a small version to scale of the lion but what you see by the legs of the lion is white
21:42
in the same way that you would visit a museum in Rome for example and the sculpture was only of the hand in the torso of a statue but the museum curator attaches the arm. They complete the reconstruction. This is the same thing that we are doing because with 16 images, the color that you see is reflected
22:00
in the geometry we have recreated. If we get more images, we can complete that model. That's a very important point to raise. So here's an example of the first version of the virtual museum being shown with these models in Amsterdam at EDFA last year. And I just want to show you because this is the absolute new version of the website
22:22
that we're doing in collaboration with Unite for Heritage at UNESCO and it is called Reclaiming History. If you go to reclaim.org, you can experience this is the first phase of the website itself so the earth loads up. You click, it's a WebGL application. Here you have the pins that were dropped originally
22:42
on the project's website that are now being integrated and pulled from the database so that people can explore it and see themselves. This does work for mobile devices as well. You just have to turn your mobile device horizontally and so a person can move around and it creates a more interactive experience than what you saw before
23:01
with a Google Maps-based application. And with this map, you can move around as I'm showing here in this video. And so here we have the Mosul Museum and it loads up and you can scroll through some of the reconstructions. So this basically just creates a more interactive experience and eventually this entire website
23:21
has been made for our project which is a volunteer project that has received zero funds since its inception and yet this has been made by pro bono work from an ad agency and a tech company as well. So it's an amazing example of what we can do together from volunteers to large corporations
23:41
to academic institutions. So I recommend that you follow us on social media. Come visit our maker space tomorrow from 12.15 to 1.15 and these are some of the people that make it happen from behind the scenes on our project. Thank you very much and we'd like to thank our volunteers as well, of course.
24:05
Yeah, thank you very much, Chance and Matthew. We've got five minutes for questions from the audience.
24:24
Yeah, we always ask people to speak into the mic. Hi, except for the virtual museums, what other users have your reconstructions been put to already? Do you have any other experience reports?
24:41
I don't know, film comes to mind, other such stuff. We haven't had anybody looking directly towards film yet. Some people have talked about that. Yeah, not specifically like people trying to recreate a scene or something. We have had people talk about using this and creating actually their own little
25:00
physical art displays, retelling some of these stories. So that's kind of the common one. Probably the most recent ones that we've gotten have been about that. Another idea that we've discussed recently or actually since the beginning is that many of these artifacts may have been destroyed or they may have been looted and sold and they are currently being sold on the black market, which is number three in the list of illicit sale
25:21
of anything on earth. So for example, maybe a three-dimensional reconstruction of an artifact that went missing could be used in comparison if someone finds it in a private collection. I think this could definitely be useful. Any other questions?
25:47
Which material is this 3D construction made from? Whatever you want. Yeah, but this, the one that you showed. That is a 70% wood filament, 30% PLA printed on a small hobby printer.
26:01
So that one takes seven hours to, oh. But the bigger ones. Oh, the bigger ones that you're saying? This one. Oh, those are gypsum prints, the powder printers. So they're the larger ones and they're color powder prints as well. So you get the whole thing. It's the Z-corp printers that have been used for that one. I would like to just stress really quickly,
26:22
just 10 seconds, is that 3D prints for this specific purpose is not exactly one of our main focuses on the project because it draws people in a public event space, but we're more interested in what we can do with digital reconstructions because we can reach a much larger crowd with virtual museums.
26:42
Yes, exactly. In terms of virtual museums, I was wondering about your position towards initiatives such as Google Cultural Institute, for example, because I am pretty convinced that this project needs a huge visibility and a huge audience to have the impact it deserves
27:00
because it's so important. So what do you, is there any potential for collaboration or so? Or would that be, I mean, you're coming from the academic field, so to connect to such a super private project that somehow I know what the conflicts there are, but on the other hand, there's always this ambivalence, no, between visibility and mass audience
27:22
versus for such important projects and keeping your distance and your independence and stuff. What's your position there? I mean, it's a project that, I mean, we're fortunate in the sense that our project is not purely academic and we recognize that we're sort of halfway between. We have our feet in the academic world.
27:41
We keep ourselves anchored there, but we recognize that this is actually a public project rather than an academic one. So we are actively seeking out these sorts of collaborations. Google is one of the people we are seeking a collaboration with. If you have any other ideas, please let us know, but we're interested in anything because it is like the back end,
28:01
producing publications from the academic sphere and presenting this at academic conferences is very important from our perspective, but on the public sphere too, or the public side. So being able to do that, I think needs something a lot more than what an academic or EU funded project would possibly, you know, for looking forward to the future,
28:20
I think it would have to be a tech company that would have to help make this go. Thank you, thank you. Do you think the virtual museum is under threat sometimes from the so-called Islamic State too?
28:43
Have you witnessed anything like it? I didn't catch the question. Whether the virtual museums, the data, is under threat too by the so-called Islamic State? It's on multiple servers? Yeah, I mean, the data is fairly well protected and one of the strategies that we've already put in place
29:03
is to have several other companies making backups of everything that we've created. So it would be really difficult for them to erase that as well at this point in time. And as we've seen, the internet tends to propagate things. It's hard to remove something from the internet. Yeah, that's true.
29:22
Our last question over here. Do you have many different users or do you have like a small group of heavy users who are interested in uploading photos that you get most of the pictures from a small group?
29:44
It's changed over time. When it hit really big with media after the Muslim Museum and then in Palmyra last year, we had people from, I visited the site, here are my photos, I don't understand how to create an account, take them. Send them through Dropbox. Then we have people that are architects
30:03
and they say, I will study architectural drawings and we can reconstruct it partially in some buildings. Then we have archeologists, it's really from every walk of life. It's really, really from every walk of life. And we can't really quantify that. We've kept everything anonymous so far until we kind of go back and forth
30:21
on this gamification question because of that. But because of the sensitive nature of the project, people's contributions have been anonymous. So we can't really say how many people have contributed, how many people have done that. All we can say is we have 350 user accounts that have been created, but we have like 100,000 visits to the site. So there's a disparity between people contributing
30:42
and people visiting and consuming the content. Yeah, and we're also willing to work with photographers or people who have images that don't want to have them displayed online publicly, but we can still use them and provide them to the volunteers so that they can be used to make the digital reconstructions. As long as we basically want to develop the flow
31:00
so that credit is given the whole way from the beginning of where those images come from to the people who have helped sort to make the reconstructions. We would like that to be part of the semantic documentation and the continuation of the story of the artifacts, really. Yeah, I wish you a very long continuation of your own story and big success
31:20
and tweet the hell out of it. Yes, please. The rest of you are available. So thank you very much, Chance and Matthew, and good luck. They will be available for further questioning face-to-face.