Can a Video Game Save the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris?
“What you lose in the fire, you will find amongst the ashes”…the proverb is eerily ironic but fitting.
What we’ve lost was the beauty and completeness of the Catholic cathedral that is Notre-Dame de Paris.
But, what we’ve found is international empathetic support and a technological opportunity to leverage Augmented Reality and Data on a global stage.
Being that the topic is focused on a Catholic cathedral, the phrase, “When God Closes a Door, He Opens a Window” seems to holds true. In this case, the true window that was opened was the window of opportunity…and that opportunity lies within Augmented Reality (AR) and Data Analysis. We’ve almost all experienced AR in some shape or form, maybe without even realizing it. From the cutesiness of using Snapchat’s face filters, to the joy of catching a legendary Pokémon on your walk to the store in Pokémon Go!, or to the excitement from when your favorite NFL team gets past the yellow first-down marker by an inch; Augmented Reality is at play and it is slowly-but-surely creeping into of everyday lives…and businesses.
The financial donations in support of rebuilding Notre-Dame came pouring in and the French President, Emmanuel Macron, has vowed to rebuild the 856 year old cathedral in the next 5 years. While reconstruction blueprints and plans haven’t been made official yet, there is one unexpected company that has offered to help.
That company is Ubisoft, creators of the popular video game series “Assassin’s Creed.” Why is a video game company offering a helping hand in a real-world physical construction project you might ask? Simple, in order to accurately recreate the interior and exterior of Notre-Dame, architects will need a detailed 3D map of the cathedral…and who has most accurate map? Ubisoft.
Why do they have a detailed 3D map of Notre-Dame de Paris? Ubisoft has Caroline Miousse to thank, she’s an artist/in-game-architect who worked on “Assassin’s Creed Unity,” a 2014-released game set in Paris during the French Revolution. While the original Notre-Dame took 182 years to build after its first brick was laid back in 1163, the virtual Notre-Dame only took around 2 years for Miousse to create. As Miousse had to say about creating the in-game cathedral, “In the case of the Notre Dame, easily the biggest structure in the game, it meant recreating a version of the cathedral that didn’t actually exist at the time. Level artist Miousse spent literally years fussing over the details of the building. She pored over photos to get the architecture just right, and worked with texture artists to make sure that each brick was as it should be. She even had historians help her figure out the exact paintings that were hanging on the walls.”
From Bricklayers to AR Map Overlayers
Though Ubisoft isn’t currently working directly with the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, they have made their willingness to share their expertise in the structure known to architects. Ubisoft’s ability to 3D map cities with an incredible level of detail allows for a major transfer of data and knowledge that could significantly impact the rebuild in regards to accuracy, efficiency, and cost!
My Parting Words
Ubisoft and many similar companies continue to build spitting-image recreations of real-world locations. The databases of detailed virtual recreations are growing significantly and the reasons to reference these databases in the future are endless. The collection and analysis data from augmented reality sources will provide insight and answers to questions that had previously gone unanswered. The growth of new data from AR sources partnered with the strong BI and analytical capabilities of Oracle Analytics Cloud will generate actionable insights for the future. I want to close by expressing my condolences to nation of France and my sorrow for the destruction caused by fire that occurred on April 15th. My hope is that technology can provide a silver lining.
