I’m surprised and delighted to counter the temple of the mysterious faces (Bayon Temple) in Communications of the ACM. ACM for Association of Computing Machinery is the world first computing society, and Communications of the ACM is one of the most popular magazines available to ACM’s members for free.
The article is about preserving the current Bayon Temple in a computer 3D model by the Japanese. Bayon is at risk of collapse due to its destabilized foundation. This work by the Japanese team is significant in Computer Science due to the size and artistic complexity of Bayon Temple which is known as the temple of the mysterious faces to many foreigners.
The Japanese team used a wide range of laser sensors to generate the 3D models of the physical artifacts, and they used sophisticated computing algorithms and computer power to put the individual 3D models from the individual artifacts together in order to reconstruct the whole temple in 3D.
This article is available here ArchivingBayon.
This article is just a news item in the Communications of the ACM. Its project is called ‘Bayon Digital Archival‘ by the University of Tokyo. On their website, there are image and movie galleries where you can see the amazing images and movies generated from their computer 3D model. They also have movies to show how to they construct this amazing 3D model with a variety of laser sensors and computer algorithms. The gallery is available at http://www.cvl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/bayon/gallery.shtml.
In the commercial world, this work can be turned into many things-good, and not so good. One of the possible outcome is to make this model into a virtual museum where Internet users can visit the temple in either in 2D or 3D at their leisure time. You cannot physically go to the temple every time you miss a magnificent drawing or object if you don’t live close to the temple, especially when you are oversea. There are always something new that you haven’t seen or known unless you are the expert in this temple. This will reduce the human impact on the temple which contributes the destabilisation of its foundation.
The Japanese people rock except they kill whales on international water close to Australia. They should also do this for the grant temple (Angkor Wat).
