3-D Buddhas: Saving Asia'a heritage

But with the touch of an iPad Mini, the space is digitally transformed into a 1,500-year-old Buddhist grotto. Its walls decorated with exquisite but faded paintings of enlightened beings, dancers and musicians.
Another swipe and a pair of 3-D glasses brings the cave to life.
Vivid pigments show how the cave must have looked when the paint first dried and animation and magnification reveal the tiniest of details.
Shaw, an Australian, co-leads a team at the School of Creative Media at Hong Kong's City University, which has pioneered the immersive digital technology -- harnessing advances in cinema, computer games and virtual reality, according to CNN.
They believe the techniques developed will help preserve key heritage sites in Asia before they are irrevocably damaged by the onslaught of mass tourism.
The team has worked on similar projects for Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Hampi in India but say this is the most ambitious in scope.
The cave featured in the prototype is part of a larger complex located thousands of miles north of Hong Kong in the Chinese city of Dunhuang, once a Silk Road oasis and now a Unesco world heritage site.
For almost two thousand years, the Mogao Grottoes, as the caves are known, withstood marauding barbarian hoards, earthquakes and the Gobi Desert's shifting sand dunes.
Today, the caves and their frescoes face a different and perhaps more potent threat -- how to manage the increasing number of tourists that come to see caves.
Some 680,000 tourists visited in 2011 and that number was exceeded by at least 100,000 last year.
But the steep rise in visitors over the past decade has raised the level of humidity and carbon dioxide inside the caves, undermining conservation efforts.
The grotto depicted by the team at City University is already closed to tourists and only 70 of the 492 decorated caves are open to the public.
The pressures brought by the surge in visitors at Dunhuang are shared by many heritage sites across China and Asia, as the region's newly affluent middle class begin to travel in greater numbers.
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