How Tourists Are Rescuing the Ancient City of Palmyra
In 2017, Bassel Khartabil, a human-rights activist and software developer who ran a hacker space in Damascus, was abducted and assassinated by the Syrian government during the Syrian civil war. Khartabil had been working to build a 3-D model of the ancient city of Palmyra, as it would’ve looked in the second century A.D., at the height of its powers, to counter its systematic destruction by ISIS, a Salafi-jihadist terrorist organization.
As word of his imprisonment. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego Library’s Digital Media Lab, led by Scott McAvoy, an expert in 3-D data processing, reconstruction, and archiving, tapped this collection to digitally resurrect the ancient city using , a method which may help architects and conservationists as they begin to rebuild the site.
