#NEWPALMYRA (also known as the New Palmyra Project) is an effort to reconstruct the ancient city of Palmyra as an immersive virtual environment, based on archaeological and other clues. The project was started from photos Bassel Khartabil had been taking of Palmyra since 2005. He began building models of the ancient city, with support from Al Aous Publishers. In 2012, Khartabil was arrested, and the original project and open source files were lost. Barry Threw took over as director of the project, renamed #NEWPALMYRA, and a community of developers, modelers, and archaeologists began collaborating to model, restore, and later recreate from scratch those historical structures captured on film and camera.
In 2015, the Islamic State captured Palmyra and subsequently destroyed some of its famous historical sites. In late 2015, the Institute for Digital Archaeology began contributing to the New Palmyra Project, sending archaeologists with cheap 3D cameras to capture any further structures that ISIL might decide to destroy.
In 2018 the project organized the mass donation of over 3,000 high-quality images from tourists, heritage professionals, and researchers. They published these images as an open source archive on Flickr.com [1] . These images portray the site over a 4 decades, with the majority of images taken in the early 2000s and 2010s. This archive has been used in a number of forensic reconstruction projects[2], providing key data for photogrammetric reconstruction[3].
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