Japanese Unesco-listed castle razed by fire to be rebuilt as 3D digital model using photos and video footage
- Rebuilding Shuri Castle in Okinawa, Japan, which was destroyed by fire in October, will take decades, so a 3D digital reconstruction is planned
- Photos and footage of the Unesco World Heritage Site collected from visitors will be combined to make an interactive model
Rei Kawakami was on a train to the airport after a conference in Seoul in October when she heard the news of the fire engulfing Shuri Castle in Okinawa.
“I’ve been to Shuri Castle and I knew that for the people of Okinawa it was part of life,” said the 39-year-old Japanese associate professor. After reading news reports about students unable to return to school due to the shock of the destruction, Kawakami felt compelled to act.
“I have children and I imagined how overwhelming it would be if they were the ones who experienced this,” said Kawakami, a computer vision specialist in the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. “I could not bear to do nothing.”
In fact, it was a paper on the virtual reconstruction of Rome, which received an award at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Seoul, that inspired Kawakami to launch Our Shurijo: Shuri Castle Digital Reconstruction, a project to build a 3D digital model of the castle using photographs and video footage contributed online.
The blaze on October 31, suspected to have been caused by an electrical fault, devastated seven wooden buildings occupying over 4,000 square metres on a hill overlooking the prefectural capital, Naha.