Vietnam embarks on ambitious scanning project

Vietnam’s Ministry of Tourism Sports and Culture is embarking on a massive project to digitally scan buildings and objects with a 3D laser scanner to create virtual models of all its historic and archaeological treasures.

Forty thousand relics to be digitized in five years
Thanh Nien News, 19 November 2010

Vietnam’s failure to develop an effective preservation strategy has been largely attributed to a poor reservoir of background knowledge about each individual site.

For this reason, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism recently launched an effort to create a virtual exhibit of every one of Vietnam’s 40,000 cultural relics.

The idea is to use a 3D laser scanner to create digital images of every part of the object or structure in question. The images are then assembled into a 3D model. All available information and research relating to the relics are joined with the virtual model to create an “exhibit.”