For a few days, Microsoft’s top staff has been in the Vatican to present Pope Francis with an identical clone of St. Peter’s Basilica. The new work of art is imposing, but it is not made of marble, brick and stucco, but of ‘bytes’ and algorithms of artificial intelligence. The model allows us to contemplate and study the center of Christendom in a way that would have been impossible until now and opens up new possibilities for the future of St. Peter’s Basilica. “No generation has ever seen the Vatican as we will see it now,” promised Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, and main promoter of the project.
The cardinal responsible for Saint Peter’s, Mauro Gambetti, says that this digital gift will be for the basilica what is “a telescope to discover the stars or a spacecraft to penetrate the starry sky.” And the truth is that the first data they have leaked is already galactic, and allows us to intuit the brilliant solutions that Renaissance and Baroque artists applied to raise the Vatican.
“It is one of the most technologically advanced and sophisticated projects that has ever been carried out, since we have combined the information of 22 ‘petabytes’ of data,” Smith boasts during the presentation of the “digital twin” of the Vatican basilica. “To preserve this data, 5 million DVDs would be needed, which when stacked would reach 6 kilometers high,” he describes.
“Digital twins” are digital replicas of objects or spaces in the physical world. They are used by the aerospace industry to run simulations and test innovations without the risk of accidents. In the case of buildings, they are used to find solutions when they need to be repaired. “In this case we have not done it to manage the operation of the basilica, but to expand human understanding,” clarifies Brad Smith.
To build it, for a month and a half they took 400,000 photographs of St. Peter’s Basilica, using drones to reach the most remote spaces, from its underground necropolis to the dome 133 meters high. «They worked very carefully at night or when the basilica was empty. We couldn’t afford to make a mistake and have a drone crash into a wall. Fortunately we never had to face any of that,” he jokes. The cameras did not simply capture the image, “they used laser technology to memorize precisely where the photographed point was and how far the lens was from the image.”
Recreation of Bernini’s baldachin in St. Peter’s
The challenge was not only to take hundreds of thousands of photographs but also to “weave” them together to build a realistic digital replica. «Each photograph is like a different piece of fabric and thanks to Artificial Intelligence we were able to sew it as if it were a giant quilt. “The technology we use was not available two and a half years ago, when we started talking about the project.”
10 kilometers of mosaics
The Uruguayan Juan Lavista Ferres, director of the ‘AI for Good’ Laboratory that has supervised the operation, explains to ABC that the idea of his department is “to help organizations solve problems.” In the case of the basilica, they needed to evaluate the health of its 10 kilometers of mosaics, made of billions of tiles measuring less than a centimeter. “They couldn’t detect where the tiles were missing, and now we have managed to do it,” he smiles with satisfaction. The other challenge was for the clone to maintain the basilica’s own spiritual message. “Our task here is to help the Vatican, we acted as required,” he adds.
Reproduction of the mosaic of the resurrected Jesus Christ
Proof that they have achieved this is that with the material produced, the basilica has designed an exhibition that reminds visitors who Saint Peter is, why he was buried here, and how this place went from being a tiny tomb in the middle of a necropolis. Roman to the most important basilica for Catholics.
In addition, they already have a hyper-realistic website ready that, starting in December, will allow virtual visits from anywhere in the world.
The virtual clone will not replace the real basilica, but it may prove essential to preserve it. “No one would say that after the Notre Dame fire it was not necessary to rebuild it because it could be seen on the Internet,” argues Brad Smith. “But if a digital twin had been made before, the reconstruction would have been much easier,” he adds. “Our responsibility is to guard and preserve this place, and allow it to be visited, with a perspective of a thousand years, to ensure that it remains standing for another thousand years,” echoes Cardinal Gambetti.
The alliance between this technology giant and the Vatican was forged in February 2020, when Microsoft supported, together with IBM and later CISCO, the Vatican charter for ethics in Artificial Intelligence. His proposal is that new technologies “be at the service of people and not replace them.” With the “virtual twin” he wants to show that there are “positive ways of using artificial intelligence.” Lavista Ferres says that they are also working on tools to help blind people navigate the Internet, or that generate hypotheses to treat rare diseases, or that prevent famines. «Each project is better because technology evolves. There have been enormous technological leaps both in algorithms and in the ability to process data,” he says.
“He will live forever”
When Brad Smith is asked what the artists who built the basilica would have thought of this clone, he says that he likes to imagine “that faced with a tool like this Michelangelo or Bernini would have stopped and asked what they could learn from it, how they could use it to this huge building. “I’d like to think it would have allowed them to be creative in ways that weren’t possible at the time.” «This twin will literally live forever. It is the perfect image of how the basilica appears in 2024. Just as we benefit from what those who built it did, I hope that future generations will discover other uses for this new heritage that we are creating for them,” he adds.
The technology company has not revealed how much it has spent on the project. Its president prefers to emphasize “the human element”, the “ability to combine experts from different teams.” “This alliance is extraordinary, it brings together organizations that do not normally work together, one of the oldest and most important institutions in the world with the latest technology developed by humanity,” he describes. He also assures that “a lot has been invested in this project and new technology has been developed to carry it out. “Now we will take the weekend off and next week we will think about the next step.” “If we have been able to do this, imagine what else we can do in the future,” he says mysteriously.
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