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PROJECT PREVIEW


PROJECT PREVIEW


A bird’s eye view of how the Dunhuang Academy Visitor Center will look when it opens in 2012


THE EXPERIENCE The new building is currently being con- structed and will have two large screen theatres and two digital domes, each with a 200-seat capacity. The two 15-minute fi lms will only be shown at the visitor centre and nowhere else in the world. Visitors will fi rst see the large format pre-


show fi lm about the history of the caves and the digital preservation work being carried out (shown with Sony SXRD T-110’s in large format confi guration). They will then go through to the 16m dome for The Splendors of Buddha’s Palace show – a tour of three of the largest caves, which takes visitors virtually inside them and brings the paintings’ stories to life. The fi rst cave tells the story of


Skyamoni’s life story before he became a Buddha. The second cave shows a dance and concert scene, which represents the Tang dynasty, and the fi nal cave’s pictures depict a party of the gods in heaven.


ABOUT MOGOA CAVES


The fi rst caves were dug out in 366AD as places of Buddhist medita- tion and worship. The Mogao Caves are the best known of the Chinese Buddhist grottos and, along with Longmen Grottoes and Yungang Grottoes, are one of the three famous ancient sculptural sites of China.


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The dome theatre was chosen for its


similarity to a cave’s environment. “When the audience sits in the dome theatre, it’s as though they’re in the actual cave, which provides audiences with a more immersive experience,” Chen says. “We’re not just providing an entertainment show,” he adds,


“we’re giving visitors the opportunity to gain an appreciation of the art.” The building has been designed to resemble a sand dune and the interior décor will incorporate earth tones. There won’t be any fl uores- cent lighting to further enhance the illusion of being inside the caves themselves. After the two shows, visitors will be


taken to the caves themselves where they will have a much greater appreciation and understanding of the artwork, thanks to the fi lms they’ve just watched. The visitor centre is a 10-minute drive


from the caves. Its distance isn’t because of the risk of building work damaging the caves, but because they wanted the visi- tor centre to be on the main road and the caves are off the beaten trail.


THE CHALLENGES For Savage, the greatest challenge is dust.


“We’re in the desert and it gets into every- thing,” he says. “Our main worry is how we’re going to keep things clean.” For Chen, the digital preservation of the


caves was his most painstaking task. “To apply the high resolution photographs (60 high resolution photos per square metre)


Read Attractions Management online attractionsmanagement.com/digital


“To recreate each cave in such incredible detail, in a format suitable for a


digital dome, has pushed the boundaries of digital preservation”


to the curved images of statues and walls from the scans, and then add texture, has required solving many problems,” he explains. “To then recreate each cave in such incredible detail, in a format suitable for a digital dome, has again pushed the boundaries of digital preservation to new levels. To achieve all of these things and create the dome show at 10k by 10k pixel resolution is, we believe, a world fi rst.” To achieve this technical breakthrough,


Chen’s team had to become a professional digitising and dome production team, get- ting involved with software development, automatic processing, data control, texture mapping and splicing, before modelling all these methods together. Thanks to their determination to portray


the cave paintings in their full glory, these ancient and treasured paintings can now be enjoyed for another 1,000 years. ●


AM 3 2011 ©cybertrek 2011


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