Orinda Company Reconstructs Historic Sites Around the World - Digitally

CyArk, an Orinda-based, self-described High-Definition Heritage Network, has spent its first eight years of operation tracking historic sites on which to test its 21st century, 3D laser scanning technology.

Commited to preserving culturally significant locations as varied as a crumbling fort on America's forgotten frontier to an endangered Asian jungle temple, CyArk's search for and digital recreation of endangered historic sites is driven by its founder, Orindan Ben Kacyra.

Kacyra has been called a modern-day Indiana Jones.  Trained as a civil engineer, the Iraqi expatriate began working with digital preservation in the 1990s as a key participant in the invention of Cyrax, the very first portable laser scanner. After marketing the product and selling it off to Leica Geosystems in 2001, Kacyra applied his technological developments to the archiving of historical and cultural sites through CyArk, founded in 2003.

The company's mission is straightforward: to “digitally (preserve) cultural heritage sites through collecting, archiving and providing open access to data created by laser scanning, digital modeling, and other state-of-the-art technologies.”

“The projects you see online are the results of numerous partnerships,” says Elizabeth Lee, Director of Projects and Development at CyArk. Some of these bonds come from site conservation groups in search of permanent digital archiving, while others come from universities or research programs looking to preserve the subjects of their research.

A native of Mosul, Iraq, CyArk's founder grew up in a country steeped in biblical and historical importance. Kacyra moved to the United States after college to pursue a civil engineering degree and find ways to keep Mosul, his city of origin, digitally intact, according to an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007.

Kacyra earned his degreed at the University of Illinois and promptly headed to the Bay Area to begin work on Cyrax and, ultimately, to create CyArk. Today, eight years after its launch, CyArk boasts an archive of over 25 3D projects internationally. The company intends to drastically increase this number, a goal it will pursue through the CyArk 500 Challenge. The project, to complete 3D documentation of 500 sites, is projected to take five years to complete based on the timing of the company’s pilot project.

The international appeal that CyArk has managed to attain thus far is impressive considering the young age of the company. With projects in well over a dozen countries, CyArk attributes its global outreach to alliances with host countries eager to have their respective sites documented.

The engineers, photographers, researchers and archaeologists who attend sites for archiving are a combination of CyArk members and representatives from these partnerships, but the company “use(s) a local team whenever possible,” said Lee. This team uses Kacyra’s laser scanning technology, by which a machine sends out a pulsed beam whose travel time from the machine to the object of interest and back is measured and collected for analysis. This process is completed for thousands of points at any given site and turned into data for CyArk’s online documents.

In addition to this cross-continental popularity with project hosts, CyArk has reached a sizeable audience online, most curious about their digital re-creations of forgotten sites. “The website gets 5,000 visitors per day,” says Lee.

Many viewers use CyArk through a professional account, settings for which are free but require that users agree not to use CyArk data and information for commercial purposes. “From that group [of professional users] we have a mix of hobbyists…and professionals in the education sector, from both university and K-12 levels…as well as culture heritage professionals [who use the site] for research or comparisons,” says Lee. “Most [viewers] come from within the US, though we do have international traffic as well…it depends on the language viewers speak and things like that.”

With this in mind, the company recently jumped on its international viewership effectively. “We just added a website in Spanish, so we are expecting increased traffic from Latin America,” says Lee.

Additionally, the company has expanded its use of social networking through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picaso, YouTube, and Panoramio.

Funding for CyArk, which is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, comes largely on a per project basis.

“Some of (CyArk’s) biggest donors right now are the National Park Service, the World Monument Fund, and the Scottish Government,” said Lee. Most other money is resultant of donations from service providers, and the presence of viewer donations is always appreciated. “We are interested in getting a lot of our viewers into funding, but that’s minimal of course.”

In pursuit of its 500-project challenge, CyArk is currently planning to archive sites in Turkey, Scotland, Mexico, Nepal, and India in the near future. But the focus on online expansion is just as important as that on projects abroad.

“In the future we do want to see that viewership and engagement grow,” said Lee.