To digitally preserve Nefertari’s tomb, Simon Che de Boer and his New Zealand–based virtual reality (VR) company RealityVirtual developed Nefertari: Journey to Eternity, a hyperrealistic virtual tour experience that takes viewers into the Egyptian tomb. “I think it’s a really good use case of preserving the past—resurrecting sites, environments, and scenes that humanity has lost or could lose due to corrosion or the elements,” Che de Boer says.

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To replicate the tomb’s elaborate details, Che de Boer captured nearly 4,000 photographs of the site, then combined photogrammetry (the science of making measurements from photographs) with deep learning methods for processing and visualization. “Essentially, we’re able to feed the computer all this data that we captured from the location, and the computer looks at all the photographs and teaches itself to understand what it’s looking at,” he says.

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