A post on MeFi pointed me to an article in my local newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, about efforts to make detailed 3-D digitizations of Unesco's World Heritage sites, as a way of preserving the details of the structure in case of disaster. While this isn't the first attempt to create a virtual World Heritage archive, the tool used in this try -- the Cyrax laser camera -- is particularly well-suited to doing rapid, detailed scans of large-scale objects (such as the ruins of Pompei or the Orinda Theater, pictured). The people undertaking this project, Ben and Barbara Kacyra, happen to be the ones who invented the Cyrax camera; after selling the technology, they started the Kacyra Family Foundation (unfortunately not on the web) as a charitable group to jump-start the World Heritage archive project.
If you're not familiar with the locations on Unesco's World Heritage list, the World Heritage Tour website shows pictures of the places, automatically refreshed every 20 seconds.
