A new research project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced a useful documentation of four hard-to-access multireligious architectural heritage sites in Afghanistan using a combination of digital renderings, satellite imaging, crowdsourced data, and XR technology. 

MIT News recently profiled the school’s “Ways of Seeing: Documenting Endangered Built Heritage in Afghanistan” effort, which was the product of multiple departments and research centers within the university. The project was led by MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center director Fotini Christia, who said it “combines field data, technology, and art to protect heritage and serve the world” in a true evocation of the university’s cross-disciplinary collaborative tradition. 

The end result produced two open-access digital archives co-managed via Archnet and MIT Libraries by the Aga Khan Documentation Center and Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Class of 2006 M.Arch graduate Jelena Pejkovic contributed carefully hand-drawn renderings made using digital models first created by Design and Computation Ph.D. candidate Nikolaos Vlavianos. Two Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) participants from Wellesley College also worked with Vlavianos to produce a video game aimed at helping children learn about the Gawhar Saad heritage site, which dates to the 15th century.

“I regard this project as an effort toward a broader architectural metaverse consisting of immersive experiences in XR of physical spaces around the world that are difficult or impossible to access due to political, social, and even cultural constraints,” Vlavianos said. “These spaces in the metaverse are information hubs promoting an embodied experiential approach of living, sensing, seeing, hearing, and touching.”

“The ultimate intent of this project has been to make all these outputs, which are co-owned with the Afghans who carried out the data collection on the ground, available to Afghan refugees displaced around the world but also accessible to anyone keen to witness them,” Christia added finally. “The digital twins [representations] of these sites are also meant to work as repositories of information for any future preservation efforts. This model can be replicated and scaled for other heritage sites at risk from wars, environmental disaster, or cultural appropriation.”

Additional information about the initiative can be found on the Ways of Seeing project website.