ON FEBRUARY 26th 2015, the militant group known as Islamic State posted a video online showing the destruction of antiquities in and around the city of Mosul in Northern Iraq. Statues and other artefacts in the Mosul Museum were smashed, and ruins around the city were broken up using hammers and pneumatic drills. The militants said they were “ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them”. For its first venture into the new medium of virtual reality, The Economist has collaborated with Rekrei, a non-profit group formerly known as Project Mosul, to recreate the museum and many of the lost artefacts, explain why they matter and examine how they were virtually reconstructed. The result is “RecoVR Mosul: A collective reconstruction”, which is now available on a range of VR platforms. Project Mosul was founded in March 2015 by Matthew Vincent and Chance Coughenour, two archaeology PhD students who wondered whether it might be possible to crowdsource images and use them to reconstruct the destroyed items using a technique called photogrammetry. This involves feeding multiple images of an object, taken from different angles, into a piece of software that combines them to form a three-dimensional model. Thousands of photographs have since been uploaded to the Project Mosul site by local people, tourists, and even American soldiers who were deployed to the area during the Iraq war. In July 2015 The Economist Media Lab invited Project Mosul to collaborate in the creation of a virtual museum to showcase the destroyed art and make it visible to the public.

The resulting VR experience, “RecoVR Mosul”, was first shown at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam in November 2015, in a display space that also included physical reconstructions of some items, produced using 3D printing. It was also shown at the Learning Technologies Exhibition in London in February 2016. The original VR experience was created for Samsung Gear VR headsets. The version now being released is available for Google Cardboard for Android, as an iOS app for use with a Cardboard adaptor, and as a YouTube 360 video (Chrome web browser required). A Gear VR version will be available shortly. The experience takes the form of a tour of the museum, with a voiceover that explains the background to the project. According to archaeologists, Mosul has the majority of the country’s archaeological wealth, with more than 3,500 sites of significance. The city remains under the control of Islamic State. As well as destroying artefacts for publicity and recruiting purposes, the militants are believed to have smuggled some of them out of the country to be sold; such racketeering is thought to be a significant source of the group’s revenue.

The advent of digital reconstructions raises questions about their ownership and use, and the extent to which they can act as substitutes for the originals. There are also worries that focusing on artefacts risks diverting attention from human suffering in conflict zones. These issues are explored in two podcasts that accompany the VR experience, which consider the role of technology in preserving cultural heritage and making it more widely accessible.

Project Mosul changed its name to Rekrei in October 2015, as it broadened its scope beyond the reconstruction of items from Mosul in particular to global heritage loss more broadly. It has, for example, been working on a virtual reconstruction of Kathmandu, which was devastated by an earthquake in April 2015. To find out more about Rekrei, contribute images or volunteer assistance, please visit their website at rekrei.org. We hope you will enjoy The Economist’s first venture into virtual reality.

Credits: Created by Ziv Schneider and Laura Chen. Commissioned by The Economist Media Lab, in association with Project Mosul/Rekrei. Music by Matthew Dougherty. Sound design and mix by Quentin Chiappetta. The Economist Media Lab: Ron Diorio, director; Frank Andrejasich, associate director; Kel O'Neill, adviser. Project Mosul/Rekrei: Chance Coughenour, founder; Matthew Vincent, founder; Dieter Fritsch, Institute for Photogrammetry, University of Stuttgart, Germany, adviser; Mariano Flores Gutierrez, digitalMED Universidad de Murcia Murcia, Spain, adviser; Victor Manuel Lopez-Menchero Bendicho, digitalMED Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain, adviser; Fabio Remondino, 3D Optical Metrology Unit Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) Trento, Italy, adviser. Project Mosul volunteers: @AD&D 4D; @ruimx; @byruimx; Petr Vavrečka, Institute of Archaeology of the CAS Prague; Giacomo Vianini of 3D Flow; Konrad Wenzel of nFrames; @a6b8. Additional VR Production by Visualise.