Romanesque Church of Saint Trophime Laser Scanned

CyArk and World Monuments Fund join to Digitally Preserve magnificent iconography

by Justin Barton
February 12, 2010
Last year CyArk partnered with World Monuments Fund (WMF) to Digitally Preserve the renowned cloister of Saint-Trophime, one of the multiple structures within the historic center of Arles, France inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Digital Preservation project, CyArk's first with the WMF, was meant to supplement current records and documentation being used by expert conservators working to repair, restore, and preserve the fragile sculptures of the Cloister.

In less than 3 days, the team of digital documentation experts, including members from CyArk's partner Christofori und Partner, completed the Cloister data capture and managed to add supplemental data of the church portal and the facades of the plaza in which it resides. In total, over 1.7 billion data points were captured along with a plethora of high-resolution digital photographs and 27 high-dynamic-range panoramic images.

This data is providing a more complete record of individual stones for the conservation team then were previously available, allowing them to annotate architectural drawings derived from the scan data with conservation concerns and degradation information right in the field. Additionally, all this data is now available on the CyArk archive.

In addition to our standard deliverables (architectural drawings, panoramas, geo-referenced media items, photographs, 3D point cloud models, videos, and still images of the data), CyArk is also very proud to announce the first project on our website to contain a new standard deliverable for us: an online Virtual Tour of the site, created wholly from the documentation panoramas.



The Virtual Tour allows users to navigate at-will throughout the site, jumping from panoramic location to panoramic location. There are multiple ways in which to navigate: hotlink arrows within the imagery, inter-changeable maps with hotlink locations, and a slider of thumbnails. Each pano is also annotated with information about what is seen in the imagery. CyArk will begin making this highly interactive, informative, and visually stunning form of multimedia delivery a standard for all future projects, but are nonetheless proud to launch our first version as part of our collaboration and new venture with the WMF.
Photo-textured 3D scan data of one of the Gothic-arched wings of the Cloister at St. Trophime.
Photo-textured 3D scan data of the portal of St. Trophime.
Photo-textured 3D scan data showing the intricate carvings of the pilars within the cloister of St. Trophime.
Related Projects:
Saint-Trophime