What ISIS Destroys, Tech Rebuilds

The ancient Syrian city of Palmyra has stood in the desert for 4,000 years. 

The city’s location in almost the geographic center of Syria made it a strategic waypoint on international trade routes in the Middle East long before the Common Era. Ancient ruins discovered in the 17th and 18th centuries revealed a unique art and architecture that were equally influenced by the conquering Greeks and Romans as they were by the indigenous Arameans.

The center of the city’s historic zone contains a half mile-long colonnade linking the ruins of two ancient temples that date back as early as the first century AD. The area earned Palmyra the nickname “The City of a Thousand Pillars.”

In 1999, the site was recognized as a national monument and protected by National Antiquities laws.

Last week, extremists from the Islamic State literally blew up one of these ancient temples.

The act was one of the group’s many recent moves to cleanse the region of its history, when cultural influences were shared and tolerance was the norm. The group claims pre-Islamic imagery to be idolatrous and non-Islamic imagery to be sacrilegious. 

The Greco-Roman fusion with Arab and Asian culture that took place in Palmyra is apparently anathema to the extremist organization.

To prevent further damage to antiquities and preserve history, the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) plans to send as many as 5,000 3D cameras to warzones where precious relics are at risk.  These camera arrays are capable of taking high-quality three-dimensional scans of freestanding objects for fast, remote, and accurate archival.

The IDA is a joint venture between Harvard University and a private foundation called the Classics Conclave, and this 3D imaging project is being called the Million Image Database.

The project doesn’t come out and say exactly what the cameras are but instead just calls them a “heavily modified version of an inexpensive consumer 3D camera.”

“Each camera contains an automated tutorial package that will help field users — local museum affiliates, imbedded military, NGO employees and volunteers — both to identify appropriate subject matters and to capture useable images,” the project’s description says.

It’s meant to serve as a model for future archival projects, and all the technology and software will be open-sourced.

But the burning question is this: If this design is going to be turned over to educators, archaeologists, and archivists, what is the consumer camera it’s based upon?

What Are They Using?

A similar project at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology used the structured light-based Breuckmann smartSCAN 3D, but these are neither consumer products nor affordable. Quite the contrary — a single unit can costs upwards of $50,000.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is singly responsible for popularizing 3D cameras as a user interface among consumer products. Further, the Kinect 3D camera system has a huge open-source community around it, involving all sorts of novel uses for the consumer-grade structured light camera.

While many of these are uses institutional and there are reports of museums using Kinect as a 3D scanner, there are a number of reasons it is not likely to be the camera used by Harvard.

For one thing, Kinect is not a mobile device; it is a USB device designed for stationary use. The prototype model used by Harvard appears to be significantly smaller than a Kinect unit and is connected to a mobile device.

For another thing, the most recent version of Kinect is approximately $150 per unit. The IDA’s project reportedly costs less than $75.

The first aftermarket 3D camera for mobile devices is called Structure from venture-backed and crowdfunded company Occipital Inc. Some of Occipital’s most recent backers include Intel Capital (NASDAQ: INTC), Grishin Robotics, and Shea Ventures. 

While it is small and compatible with the entire family of iPads, it carries a price tag of nearly $400 per unit, placing it well outside of the budget mentioned by the IDA.

Other companies have devices that land somewhere between all of the above-mentioned cameras, as well. Singaporean peripheral and hardware company Creative Technology Ltd. (SGX: C76), for example, makes consumer-grade 3D interface cameras compatible with Intel’s RealSense 3D interface platform.

Japanese consumer electronics company Sharp began developing a consumer-grade 3D camera module for smartphones and tablets nearly five years ago.

It’s currently unclear what the finished product will be, and the field of camera parts manufacturers is large, but it’s certain that 3D scanners are going to be a major component for large-scale archival projects.

Eventually, the entire world will be stored as a three-dimensional file, and that will take three-dimensional scanners.

Good Investing,

Tim Conneally

 @TimConneally on Twitter

For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.