Drones are about to start mapping the Great Wall of China in incredible detail
Many sections of the wall are in remote or hard-to-reach areas, and some have fallen into disrepair.
The news: Intel and the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation have teamed up to deploy drones to scan and capture 3-D images of the structure. A detailed model of the nearly 700-year-old Jiankou portion of the wall, in the mountains north of Beijing, will be created and used to identify sections that are most in need of restoration.
Why drones? The Jiankou stretch of the wall is in notoriously steep, densely vegetated terrain, making regular maintenance and inspection difficult for humans. The data from Intel’s drone fleet will help prioritize and augment manual inspection and repair.
Why it matters: The partnership shows how new technology can complement more traditional work. A job of the future we recently speculated about, the so-called “national identity conservationist,” may not be as far off as we thought.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.