Eternal Egypt: Experiences and Research Directions

Abstract  Eternal Egypt is a large scale collaborative effort between the government of Egypt and the IBM Corporation to use information technology to document and present Egyptian cultural heritage. Three dimensional scanning is one aspect of this project. We examine the approach taken to scanning in the project, present lessons learned, and discuss open research problems. In particular, we describe the concepts of progressive fallback and continuous feedback in the capture phase, incorporation of additional data and error approximations in the processing phase, multiresolution representaions and image-based editing in the modification phase, principles of use of three dimensional models in presentations, and finally some unexplored issues in validation and archiving.