The tech giant will provide key AI assistance to French start up Iconem, to help them build a replica of the cathedral.

Paris

Microsoft has teamed up with France's culture ministry and the French start-up Econame to create a digital twin of the newly restored Notre-Dame Cathedral. Using advanced AI and thousands of images captured by cameras and drones, the project reconstructs the cathedral in fine detail, producing a point cloud that replicates its shape and color.

The digital model will be accessible to both scientists and the public, and is expected to be featured in the future Notre-Dame museum. The initiative builds on previous work by Microsoft and Econame, who created a similar digital twin for St Peter's Cathedral in Rome. The digital twin will also serve as a preservation tool for future generations, with Microsoft and Econame donating the final product to the State of France.

Microsoft creates Notre Dame Cathedral digital twin

American firm Microsoft has partnered with France's culture minister and a local company to create a digital twin of the newly restored Notre-Dame Cathedral. The tech giant will provide key AI assistance to French start-up Econame to help them build a replica of the church. The final product should be made available to scientists and the public. We have cameras, we have cameras on the pole, we have drones and we take like thousands of pictures, hundreds of thousands of pictures. And then we have an algorithm that processes all these pictures together to rebuild dot by dot, point by point, you know, what we call a point cloud that recreates the shape and the colour of the monument. This announcement comes as restoration work on the cathedral is approaching completion six years after the fire that devastated part of the monument. Microsoft and Econame already worked together on a similar project in Rome with a digital twin for St Peter's Cathedral. It allows us to see details that are hard to see when you visit the monument. For example, at St Peter's, some mosaics are 120 metres above the ground. We have no way of seeing what they represent and thanks to the technology that we use, including image acquisition technology, we can see every detail, every part of these mosaics. The digital structure is also expected to be displayed in the future Notre-Dame museum, announced in 2023 by French President Emmanuel Macron. Through this, it will be possible to create a digital twin that can be in the museum of Notre-Dame, the museum can make it accessible online if it would like, and it will create a tool for preservationists in the future, hundreds of years from now, because they'll be able to preserve the cathedral with this detailed knowledge of what it looks like today. And I think this very much builds on the obvious recent, enormously successful work to restore Notre-Dame. The convention, signed by all parties at the French Culture Ministry on Monday, states that Microsoft and Econem will donate the digital masterpiece to the State of France.

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