Wednesday, August 1, 2018

CyArk Taps GPUs to Capture Visual Records of World Heritage Sites

When the Taliban blew up two 1,700-year-old statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001, preservationists around the world were shocked, perhaps none more so than Ben Kacyra. A software developer who’d just sold his industrial mapping company, Kacyra wanted to do something good with his technology skills. The Taliban’s appalling actions gave him a perfect topic on which to focus. The result was CyArk, a nonprofit that has spent the past 15 years capturing high-resolution imagery of World Heritage Sites. “There was no record, no videos, no detailed photos,” said John Ristevski, CEO of CyArk, who helped Kacyra with the organization’s initial projects. “Ben was aghast and thought we needed 3D records of these things.”