The goal of the “Twin it!” campaign is to better capture Europe’s digital cultural heritage and make it tangible with more 3D modelling. Today, aside from objects that are photographed or scanned as text or images, only 0.01% of all 57 million cultural objects are available in 3D format.

The Ministries of Culture of the Member States of the European Union, together with national cultural institutions, has launched the European “Twin it!” campaign to create digital high-quality 3D renderings of material cultural objects. Individual objects, selected for their symbolic significance, are being digitised, including Finland’s Tartu Observatory, Croatia’s Momjan castle and Italy’s Hercules Farnese. These methods are used to create 3D “digital twins” of cultural monuments, thereby preserving cultural heritage and keeping them visually accessible for future generations.

The campaign addresses technical challenges associated with the 3D digitisation of buildings and monuments and seeks to promote high quality standards. Even though 3D modelling is already being used intensively in some areas (such as monument conservation and visualisation), further projects involving 3D digitisation are now expected to be initiated in order to fully exploit the potential of 3D models.

These high-quality 3D digital copies from the individual countries are intended to serve as flagship projects, thereby making 3D digitisation of cultural objects visible and more attractive for other institutions. The new models are 3D digitisation pioneers and serve as a benchmark for other institutions, demonstrating just how fascinating and useful 3D digitisation can be.

For Austria, the Heidentor, or “Pagans’ Gate”, in Petronell-Carnuntum in Lower Austria was selected for the 3D digitisation as a part of the Twin it! campaign. Three 3D models of the gate are currently being generated for this project: One visually digitised model and two additional models that depict a total of three historical eras. The appearance of the Heidentor has changed considerably over the years due to stone theft occurring up to the 20th century and repeated restoration measures; the aim of the three models is to visualise these stages and make them tangible.

The current state of the Heidentor will be compared across various eras in history. To do this, a drone will first be used to record the Heidentor as it stands today and will create a 3D model of the monument. In addition, two further 3D models based on various representations – such as a watercolour painting by Rudolf von Alt from 1837 and photographs from the early 20th century – will be created and then combined for comparison. The results of the digitisation will be made available on the websites of the supervising institutions as well as in Kulturpool and forwarded to Europeana.

The digitised objects will be transmitted to the Europe-wide search engine Europeana via the national aggregators and will be presented in a special online collection there. The pan-European 3D collection will also be presented at a final event in Brussels.