A video game is the key to the restoration of the newspaper Notre Dame – El Ciudadano and the region

French President Emmanuel Macron is committed to rebuilding the iconic cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, devastated by a catastrophic fire on Monday. The flames collapsed the spire of the cathedral and the wooden frame of its roof. In addition, the fire has spread to one of its historic rectangular towers. The Paris fire chief, Jean-Claude Gallet, said that the church structure had been saved.

The two richest families in France have already paid more than 300 million euros for the restoration of the cathedral. However, the recovery of this complex and monumental architectural work will not be an easy task and will probably take years, if not decades.

Players to the rescue

To restore the temple, detailed drawings and images of Our Lady will be needed. Some Twitter users pointed out that hope in the middle of the ashes was something unusual: "Assbadin's Creed: Unity", the famous historical fiction video game developed by the French studio Ubisoft, can contribute to this task.

Assbadin's Creed: Unity, released in 2014 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, will take place in Paris in the late eighteenth century. This is the first game in the series Assbadin & # 39; s Creed – about which a film with the same title has already been shot – in which many buildings and architectural monuments are recreated on an individual scale.

One of the artists who worked on the creation of the game, Caroline Miousse, said The edge who spent two years studying the appearance of Our Lady in every detail, including every stone, to represent it with the greatest precision.

In Assbadin's Creed: Unity, you can explore this iconic church, as it could never have done in real life. For example, get on the roof, hang on to the famous gargoyles or look around the temple. Ubisoft developers have actually compiled a detailed interactive 3D map of the cathedral.

Precision and inaccuracy

It was so much the detail in which we were working to recreate the cathedral that it was even possible to save up to the places where there were various paintings located in the connotated French church. , whose first stone was laid by Pope Alexander III in 1163 and whose construction did not end but around 1345.

Inside, the sculptures and paintings could not be placed in the same place, because the author's right of the cathedral itself did not allow it.

However, even the designers of the game knew the real place where all the sculptures were sent, but only that they were invested to avoid the problems of law.

Dozens of videos available on YouTube compare the current cathedral (before the fire) to its version of the game.

3D laser map

The video game is not the only usable way for restoration work: recently, another detailed map of the monument was created in 3D. Hannah Groch-Begley, PhD student at the State University of New Jersey (USA), shared on her Twitter account the work of art historian Andrew Tallon, who used laser scanners to create a cathedral model with almost impeccable accuracy.

"Mounted on a tripod, the laser beam travels for example the choir of the cathedral and measures the distance between the scanner and each point it reaches.Each measurement is represented by a point of color, which creates a three-dimensional image of the cathedral cumulatively "explains the profile of Tallon's work in the magazine. .

"If he did his job well," said Tallon (who died late last year) at the magazine, the badysis is "accurate to within five millimeters".