 How's everybody doing? We're going to get the energy up in here by talking about cultural heritage preservation. Can we? This lighting sucks. Can we turn off any of this? It's like, I don't know how you guys sat in fluorescent light for, like, all morning. Oh, does that feel better? We're just getting the mood started for cultural heritage preservation. Hello. What I'm going to talk to you all today about is a project called New Palmyra that myself and a number of associates who are also present are working on here at Boss Asia 2016. But the project really, and it's focused on preserving endangered cultural heritage with digital tools using an approach that is very reminiscent of open source development community building, those sorts of techniques. And the story of this project really starts with this gentleman, who you may have seen around in various sorts of facsimile, who's named Basil Cardebel. He's a Syrian-Palestinian, open internet, open information activist, open source software developer, who started working around Damascus around 2005 on remodeling the ruins of this city named Palmyra that is one of a sort of a cultural jewel of Syria. Syria has the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites of any country of its size. It has about six of them. So it's a fairly rich, rich ground. So in order to preserve this, to give people some insight onto what the city was like, Basil, with a group of publishers named Al-Aus and Damascus, started 3D modeling this place and came up with some through research and development, created these 3D models that they kept, unfortunately, closed. So there were things like this. There were some renderings made. And it sort of culminated in a video like this. This isn't my music. This is like what they, and if you can read on there, this is from 2009. I don't know who made it. John, do you know who made the music for this? Yeah, Basil made this music. Huh? Oh, maybe it does. Good eye, Gloria. It's like, oh, there are credits in there. Music by Nori Iskandar. We need to find Nori. Get him back into service. So anyway, you can see this is sort of a low-res, early blocking sort of the walkthrough of this city. And since the time where this was produced, a couple of things happened. One is the whole country was thrown into turmoil. And so unfortunately, this data is largely lost. We've tried to do what we can about getting it, but they're not interested in opening this data so it can be shared with the world. And the other thing is that in the civil unrest there, Basil was interred for about three years, was in a prison camp called Adra, where we had some communication with him. And about six months ago, last October, he was moved to a known location. And so there are efforts to find his location and health status and get him out, which is a whole other topic of conversation. You can see him, there was a global sort of promotional events that were around the world yesterday on the 19th. And the other thing that's happened is ISIS has rolled into the area and started destroying some of the cultural heritage of this region. This is a building called the Temple of Bell in Palmyra. And you can see here a couple of satellite images from, again, around October of last year, where the temple used to stand. And now there's just an archway in the front of it. And so because of all these reasons, we relaunched this project both to make this data available for research and other sorts of creative projects, also to tell the story of how Basel was focused on disseminating, advancing the cultural heritage of Syria in a way that was really a positive force for the culture of the region. And as I said before, we're approaching it as an open-source software strategy. So this slide is just to show some of the folks that are on board. There's some places like MIT Media Lab, where Basel has actually been offered a fellowship to continue this project. Once he gets released, Creative Commons, several arts centers with a big portion of the project is creative. So we're developing a lot of creative works, artworks, getting artists involved, people that can use this data. And so our approach has several stages. One of them, the first is research, gathering data on how we're going to remodel this stuff, plans, things like that. We're open-sourcing everything in public domain, all the data that we gather, everything we make with it. And then rebuilding the models. This is our new model of the Temple of Bell. It's just several renderings of it going in the door. And interesting things happen since we started doing this. On the website, all this is downloadable. There's a GitHub. If you go on newpalmira.org, people start contributing. So here's some contributed other renders, various daylight times of day, the Temple of Bell, reconstructed in virtual space. We've had a lot of 3D prints made. There are two temples of Bell, I guess, that's how you. I don't know what the plural of Temple of Bell is. So if there are any archaeologists that want to figure that out for me. And the arches of triumph, which have also been destroyed. We did a 3D printing sprint with people all over the world contributing to this, to 3D print these things, get them in people's hands. Things in virtual reality space. There are these gentlemen, virtual gentlemen here, hanging out at the Temple of Bell. And also, people have contributed a whole lot of other statuary artifacts from the site. So this is a lot. It's a lion statue that was also destroyed, looking pretty good there. And the arches of triumph, being recreated. Annie made this one. Hey. There's another rendering of that. So we're doing both this online process of getting people to contribute, build new models, contribute research data. But we're also doing a number of workshops around the world. This one was in Paris. I'm trying to get people to be stakeholders in this process and just be involved with the prospects of cultural heritage in general. More VR. Let's look at this one for a while. So Paris, Dubai, Hong Kong, Berlin. We've done workshops all over the world dealing with this sort of cultural heritage preservation. People contributed to models, rebuilding things. And so if anybody wants to come downstairs, we're doing the world's first 2D print of the Arches of Triumph downstairs, where we have a lot of people coloring sections and we're making kind of a group crowd sourced rendering of this thing. We're down in the tinkering studio. So if anybody wants to come down and contribute their brick to the rebuilding of Syrian cultural heritage, you're more than welcome. We'll be there all day. And that's all I got for you today. My name's Barry. The project's New Palmyra. It's at newpalmyra.org. We would love anyone to contribute. What time is it? I probably have a couple of questions. If anybody has any questions, I'm happy to answer them about anything really, not even about this, just if you have questions in general. Now is the time to get my feedback on it. Yes? Are the 3D models accurate? I'm sorry, they what, the 3D models? Oh, accurate? Yes. Well, they're as accurate as we keep improving them. So it's another one of those released early often sorts of things where we're doing the best we can and we're improving the models in an open source way as we go. I mean, there are archaeologists that contact us and say, what's this brick doing there or whatever? And then we modify it and do some research and see what the thing is and try and make it better all the time. In terms of we're remodeling these buildings in a speculative way because there was really no, we're not remodeling the ruins as they were in 2015. We're remodeling sort of an ideal state of these things as they were built. And so the whole project has like a speculative bent on it. There was no point in history where all these buildings were just standing there perfectly built. And so it's very atemporal. And we're just taking a snapshot from a lots of different times and reconstructing this thing. Yeah, another question. With both the graphs or plans or? Good question. And where do you get them from? We're using a lot of different techniques. We're using photogrammetry when we can. The thing about photogrammetry and those types of techniques is the thing was already a ruins even before they blew it up. And so it's not like we have a completed building there that we can just, you know. So there's a lot of some of its best guesses. This site has been studied by many, many archaeologists. So there's information out there. And we can make best guesses based on other architecture and things like that. So in that sense, like I said, we're not snapshotting the ruins as they were. We're making sort of best guess of what they looked like. How do you feel? Do you interact with them? Are they interested in contributing? Yeah, they're very interested. There is a lot of dialogue in the archaeology community about digital tools and how they can be brought to bear on the problems of cultural heritage preservation. This destruction is a big problem a lot of places around the world. And it's actually a big, it's also a big, I mean it goes so far as to be a national security issue where there's a big black market of looting of artifacts and things like that that both feed terrorist organizations and other sorts of bad actors, both sovereign and private. So there's a lot of discussion about how these digital tools come into play and how we can use modeling and the dissemination of information to deal with some of these issues. But there's no consensus really and so, and not much. That community is just starting to think about this kind of thing. And so it's more, there's a lot of education involved when talking to archaeologists about like, OK, why is this a valuable strategy? And there's mixed opinion on it. All right, thank you very much.