Baidu wants to rescue Nepal’s damaged world heritage sites in crowdsourced 3D

The world has been reeling since Nepal was struck by a devastating earthquake on Saturday, a quake which has taken more than 5,000 lives as of this writing. But the earthquake has taken more than lives: it has also done irreparable damage to many of Nepal’s UNESCO World Heritage sites. Kathmandu has seven, more than any other city in the world, and all of them were damaged in the quake.

Nepal has had to rebuild parts of its World Heritage sites after quakes before, but following this most recent disaster, Chinese search giant Baidu has apparently resolved to help reconstruct them digitally so that they can be preserved forever. The company has set up a page on its photography portal that allows anyone to upload photos they’ve taken of the damaged cultural treasures. Baidu will then use the photos to stitch together an immersive, tourable digital reproduction of the World Heritage locations before they were damaged that anyone can enjoy online.

It’s not clear when the digital reproductions will be finished, and at present the website is available only in Chinese, which could limit the number of submissions Baidu receives. But the process of uploading is pretty easy even if you don’t speak Chinese: just mouse over the location you’ve got photographs of and then click the blue button to upload. Needless to say, you’re giving Baidu permission to use any photographs you do submit.

A number of major tech companies, including Facebook and Google, have implemented new technology aimed at bolstering rescue and recovery efforts since Saturday’s devastating quake.