How can ordinary Ukrainians play a role in preserving cultural heritage during wartime? One project that is empowering them is Backup Ukraine which allows volunteers in Ukraine to scan objects in the country, which are then turned into 3D models that are preserved in the digital cloud.
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“Destroying a country's cultural heritage is the fastest way to undermine its national identity,” Søren la Cour Jensen, Chair of Blue Shield Denmark, said in a press release. “As we have learned after World War II and many later conflicts, saving a country’s cultural heritage is the best path to reconstruction and revival of society. Total loss is our greatest fear, and Backup Ukraine provides a new and important tool that can prevent that.”
 
The term “cultural heritage” refers to an “expression” of a way of life, developed by a community and then passed down to other generations. Cultural heritage can include “tangible” items like books, artifacts, and buildings, as well as “intangible” things like traditions and language.
 
According to research done by the University of Cambridge, items of cultural heritage can be deliberately targeted during wartime to inflict pain and societal trauma.
 
Using 3-D reconstruction technology, Backup Ukraine can preserve tangible cultural heritage by saving capture scans to its data archive, away from bombs and other types of destruction.
Growing support from the international community
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The idea for Backup Ukraine initially came out of Virtue, an agency powered by American-Canadian Media Group Vice. Virtue is an agency that “builds brands from inside culture” according to their website. The team at Virtue was concerned about the destruction of cultural heritage in Ukraine and wanted to develop a project to help preserve these items digitally.
 
Virtue reached out to Polycam, who quickly agreed to provide the 3-D modeling technology and make it accessible for all Ukrainians to use on the ground. Virtue and Polycam then partnered with the Danish UNESCO Commission and BlueShield Denmark, both heavily involved in cultural heritage preservation. The partnership soon took off, and to date, there are now about 14 partners helping with the project.
 
“We really didn’t expect this thought experiment to go as far as it did,” said Tao Thomsen, creative director for Virtue.
 
Initially, all interested volunteers had an onboarding process they had to complete to participate in the project. This included completing a volunteer course to ensure safety and obtaining necessary paperwork (like a press card). But because Ukrainians were signing up for the app very quickly, it became difficult to manage the process.
 
“When we saw that people were downloading the app and just starting without our permission […] We realized that we can’t stop, that people are doing it anyway [without the paperwork] and we might as well stop managing that list,” Thomson said.
 
Elliott Spelman, a developer at Polycam who developed the technology for Backup Ukraine, estimates that there were about 30,000 downloads of the app in Ukraine over the last year.
How Polycam’s 3-D capture technology has changed cultural heritage preservation
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Backup Ukraine uses Polycam’s 3-D capture technology on a volunteer’s phone, a process that has effectively sped up the process of preservation.
 
“Old school 3-D scanners could take a considerable amount of time to scan an object, a luxury that you don’t have during the war,” Thomsen said, “so the sheer speed and scale of this project is important.”
 
Modern 3-D capture technologies are quicker, but all have a relatively similar process for capturing an object explained Spelman.
 
“Simply put, you get a bunch of images, you figure out where they are in space relative to each and use that spatial information to figure out the depth of how far away from everything in the image is from the actual perspective of the images taken. And if you have depth information of the photographs, then you fuse the depth information of all the photographs together, which is kind of like a sculpting process. And the more slices [photos] you add the more accurate the final version the sculpture is,” he said.
 
Another effect of the widespread accessibility and use of Polycam’s technology is that it has resulted in the preservation of not just cultural property that can be found in museums, but also of ordinary objects that are significant to Ukrainians.
 
“In other words, it’s not just the ‘sights’ that you see when you look in the history books or museums, it’s also people documenting things that are part of ordinary life, and I think that’s very beautiful to see someone document their ‘lived life’ in such detail that a simple photo or video might not be able to,” Thomsen said.
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Spelman added that the capturing of ordinary objects has reignited conversations about what is considered “culturally important” to each person.
 
“If you were a refugee escaping from a country and someone was like ‘you can get a perfect 3-D model of 10 things that matter to you,’ are you really going to choose the statue in the square? It’s interesting that we might settle on things like a Teddy Bear or your home as being culturally important,” he said.
 
Aside from documenting cultural items, volunteers have also used the app to document the destruction of property in the war, something that Thomson said has a humanizing effect for viewers not directly in the war zone.
 
“In a way, you get so close to [an event] that normally becomes a statistic in the media,” he said.
Race against time
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The project itself however was not without some challenges and surprises. One challenge Thomson explained was that because they were developing the project during wartime, the development and launch of the project needed to be expedited.
 
“Every day we didn’t launch, something was destroyed,” Thomson explained, “So it was a race around the clock to deploy the project quickly.”
 
It is difficult to determine the exact amount of cultural property that has been destroyed by the war in Ukraine. A June 2022 count by UNESCO estimates that around 154 cultural sites have been partially or totally destroyed since the beginning of the war, with about three-quarters of the damaged sites in the regions of Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Kyiv.
 
The Ukrainian government has also kept a list of cultural property that has been destroyed by Russian attacks and currently estimates that about 412 cultural sites have been partially or totally destroyed.
 
However, it should be noted that both estimates only account for “cultural property,” which typically includes monuments, artwork, buildings and places of worship, archaeological sites, museums and depositories, libraries, archives, scientific collections, etc. Accounting for the fact that there are other kinds of “tangible” cultural property like books, clothing, machines, and other artifacts, the true amount of destroyed cultural heritage may be higher.
 
Despite the race against time, Virtue and Polycom were able to deploy the project within about 2-3 weeks of finalizing the agreement with all the partners involved.
 
Thomsen also stressed how well and how fast the project turned out.
 
“We have been completely surprised by the amount of generosity and the speediness we have encountered,” Thomson said, “We did not assume this would go as swiftly and as broadly as we did, and it has been a great success.”