Last week was Pop!Tech: The Impact of Technology on People conference in Camden, Maine.  While surfing around to see what bloggers were saying about it, I found this post, Tibet in 3D, by Ethan Zuckerman that describes a presentation by  Losang Rabgey, the Executive Director of a nonprofit that promotes sustainable development in the Himalayan region, Machik.  Rabgey is also on the board of directors of the Tibetan Himalayan Digital Library. (Marshall Kirkpatrick interviewed Dan Haig, who works for the Tibetan Himalayan Digital Library, for NetSquared last February).

Zuckerman describes an exciting project that Rabgey is involved in, the Lhasa Neighborhoods Project:

[I]t overlays the boundaries of traditional neighborhoods over the contemporary map, neighborhoods that remain only in stories and memories. People can explore these neighborhoods via map and 360 degree photo panoramas. This means that students in rural villages can see sites like the Parkour Plaza, the plaza outside the most holy of temples.

These “cultural meaning maps” combine the knowledge in the heads of elders with knowledge collected with cameras and GIS devices. The information online includes interactive blueprints, which are sync’d with 360 panoramas of the inside of temples and buildings. The virtual spaces are layered with high-resolution scans of the artwork. The sites are tri-lingual: Tibetan, Chinese and English.

 You can read more about what bloggers are saying about Pop!Tech here, and listen to recordings from the 2005 and 2004 Pop!Tech conferences here.

Photo credit: Lhasa05 by Steve Taylor.