Non-profit organization CyArk has teamed up with ICOMOS, Google Art & Culture and worked with site managers across the world to create 3D documentation of 5 UNESCO sites which are affected by climate change.

Wind, sea level rising, rising temperature - these all affect our cultural heritage sites, hence the importance of preserving these sites is rising as well. CyArk used RealityCapture to document these sites and gave in-depth workshop to teach local communities on how the data are captured and are processed in the software. Together with the data they have also released tutorials on how to process them within RealityCapture.

“From Rapa Nui in the South Pacific to the Bangladesh river delta - Heritage on the Edge (http://g.co/heritageontheedge) tells the story of five UNESCO World Heritage sites and their struggle to withstand a rapidly changing climate.”

Three resulting data sets of this UNESCO sites have been released on Open Heritage 3D so anyone can access it and work with the source data. Data sets from Bagerhat in Bangladesh, Chan Chan in Peru and Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania are now available to download on Open Heritage 3D.

Capturing Reality has decided to support this project and license these data sets with PPI credits. This means that anyone who wishes to work with RealityCapture can download the software for free and use the licensed data set. Hence, people can learn and teach photogrammetry completely for free and get access to various inputs such as laser scans, drone and ground images.

"We are very excited to offer pre-licensed access to Open Heritage data for RealityCapture users" said John Ristevski, CEO and Chairman of CyArk. "We utilize RealityCapture internally for processing our 3D heritage data and we are excited to see what the RC community can create."

Moreover, people can freely create new outputs for cultural heritage and generate new ideas and solutions to support sites in their fight against climate change.