THE VATICAN Digitizing centuries of history SAINT PETER’S BASILICA, ROME. This architectural masterpiece bears witness to the start of a new era of heritage restoration using AI and digital modeling technologies. The Vatican teamed up with Microsoft and French start-up Iconem to process almost 400,000 high-resolution photographs to create a digital twin of the building accurate to the nearest millimeter. AI was used to compare these hundreds of thousands of geotagged images with archival documents. This led to the identification of signs of deterioration and structural weaknesses invisible to the naked eye, hidden architectural features, and previously unknown detail on the materials. © Microsoft and Iconem INSPIRING PROJECTS 43
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTA2Nw==