Greece Partners with Microsoft to Digitally Preserve Ancient Olympia

Greece and Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced “Ancient Olympia: Common Grounds,” a new collaboration to digitally preserve and restore ancient Olympia, the original home of the Olympic games, using AI.

This digital revival project allows viewers around the world to explore ancient Olympia as it stood more than 2,000 years ago through an immersive experience via an interactive mobile app, a web-based desktop experience, or a Microsoft HoloLens 2 exhibition, at the Athens Olympic Museum.

Digitally preserving ancient Olympia gives people a way to walk through the site during one of history’s most important periods — brought to life in a realistic, engaging way that was never before possible. This new form of digital archiving will continue to offer a portal to another era, helping us understand what humanity has achieved in the past and reminding us of what we’re capable of today.

“Ancient Olympia: Common Grounds is a unique way of experiencing Greece’s proud cultural heritage. Visitors around the world can virtually visit the ancient site of Olympia and experience history firsthand using augmented reality technology,” said Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Prime Minister of Greece at the launch.

Digital preservation of Olympia “a stunning achievement in cultural heritage”

“The project to digitally preserve ancient Olympia is a stunning achievement in cultural heritage, bringing together humanity and cutting-edge technology to benefit the world and empower coming generations with new ways to explore our past,” said Brad Smith, president and vice chair of Microsoft.

“With the digital representation of the Panhellenic sanctuary of Ancient Olympia, its cultural heritage — but also the values of Olympism, peace, harmony, excellence and noble rivalry — becomes accessible to the whole world through the use of state-of-the-art technology,”  said Lina Mendoni, the Hellenic Republic’s Minister of Culture and Sports.

In total, the project digitally preserves 27 monuments at the site, among them the original Olympic Stadium, the temples of Zeus and Hera, and the workshop of the renowned sculptor Phidias. In the 3D experience, these buildings are recreated in lifelike detail, painstakingly researched by the Hellenic Ministry’s expert archaeologists to be as true as possible to their original forms. This includes historical timelines of the site’s changes over time and depictions of artifacts from each period.

Through its AI for Cultural Heritage initiative, Microsoft partnered with technology company Iconem, which specializes in digitizing historic sites in 3D, to create the foundational model of ancient Olympia. Both on-the-ground cameras and drones were used to take hundreds of thousands of images of the site, which Microsoft AI processed to create models so precise, they render as photorealistic.

The collaboration between the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports and Microsoft brought together people from diverse backgrounds — theoretical and technical, like archaeologists and developers — and from various parts of the world to work, find new ways to overcome challenges, and eventually find a common ground to make this project come to life — not just to preserve the past with the use of AI technology but also to drive these principles into the future.

These monuments survived thousands of years of weather, war, earthquakes and modernization, and are in need of digital preservation to ensure that all the evidence of the rich history and civil common ground values that the site was built upon is handed over to future generations.