Participatory 3D Documentation of Thousands of Balinese Temples: A Preliminary Study

Documenting cultural heritage sites at scale through community-participatory approaches offers considerable promise. Our work investigates the feasibility of participatory 3D documentation techniques in the context of Balinese temples. Bali is home to thousands of sacred temples whose physical appearance has never been comprehensively documented. Documenting them presents four challenges: (1) the number of temples; (2) variation in temple size, environmental setting, and access; (3) time pressure from ongoing natural and developmental changes; and (4) complications arising from their religious significance. Using an action research methodology, we iteratively designed a participatory 3D documentation approach, realized through the BADHI (Bali Digital Heritage Initiative) digital platform. BADHI platform is an integrated system comprising a mobile application for video collection, a monitoring dashboard, a video-to-3D reconstruction pipeline, and a web viewer. Across three project phases, we carried out cycles of planning, action, and reflection. Phase 1 includes design, implementation, and evaluation of the mobile application for data contribution. Phase 2 includes a limited field deployment of open participatory 3D documentation on our campus in Bali. Phase 3 includes community studies in four villages. This paper presents the reflections and adaptations formulated across these phases, community feedback, and an initial descriptive evaluation of the collected metadata, videos, and 3D models. Overall, we demonstrate that our approach is capable of supporting participatory 3D documentation of Balinese temples. Our key findings emphasize the importance of building relationships with local communities rather than relying solely on open participation, accommodating community preferences regarding data collection, storage, and use, providing proper contributor training, and attending carefully to the semi-automated video-to-3D reconstruction process. Encouraged by these results, we also identify the need for further policy development to enable full-scale deployment.