In order to help the Holy See manage visitor flows and identify conservation issues, the Vatican and Microsoft presented a digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica that utilizes artificial intelligence to explore one of the most significant monuments in the world.
As the Church gets ready for Jubilee festivities in 2025, an AI-enabled initiative called “St. Peter’s Basilica: AI-Enhanced Experience” was unveiled Monday in partnership with Microsoft and heritage digitization firm Iconem.
In 2022, the cardinal and Microsoft President Brad Smith were admiring Michelangelo’s La Pieta statue in a basilica when the cardinal said the idea to develop the new services came to him.
They decided it was important to make the meaning of these significant and ancient pieces of art “understandable and accessible” to a wider audience.
“It is literally one of the most technologically advanced and sophisticated projects of its kind that has ever been pursued,” Microsoft’s president Brad Smith told a Vatican press conference.
The digital replica is being made available online along with two new on-site exhibitions to give visitors—both real and virtual—an interactive experience.
It was created using 400,000 high-resolution digital photos that were shot over four weeks when no one was in the basilica using drones, cameras, and lasers.
According to Smith, it also stemmed from the fact that the tech giant has been collaborating closely with Vatican officials since 2018, beginning with the “Rome Call for AI Ethics,” which is a pledge made by international organizations to adhere to important ethical standards in the rapidly developing technology of today.
AI is used in the tech company’s “AI for Good” lab to model and produce digital representations of any physical entity, including buildings, factories, and entire cities.
“Microsoft had done similar work elsewhere in Europe,” he added, referring to the 3D holographic representation of Mont-Saint-Michel in France.
We earlier reported that Meta is reinstating facial recognition technology to its platforms, more than three years after Facebook discontinued its “face recognition” tool because of significant concerns over the technology.
