Culture & Sports
22:49, 21-Jul-2017
Social app provides virtual tours of Beijing’s Forbidden City
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It's now possible for visitors to take a virtual tour of parts of Beijing’s Forbidden City, without actually setting foot on the majestic grounds.
The official app of the Palace Museum (Gugong Zhanlan in Chinese) allows visitors to share stories online. More than 400,000 imperial artifacts have been digitized, but the job is far from complete.
Thousands of items are being photographed by highly-skilled professionals, some are being captured using 3D technology, and then placed inside virtual replicas of Palace rooms, after 55,000 artifacts were found in April.
It can be challenging to convert so many things into an accurate 3D representation, according to Ouyang Hong, a senior digitization engineer. But the work is worth it to bring more of China to the world, said the director of Palace Museum Institute for Digitization.
“The world doesn't fully understand Chinese culture or the Chinese people ... very deeply. We want to use the Internet to help change that,” the director, Su Yi, said.
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