VATICAN CITY — The Vatican and Microsoft on Monday unveiled a digital replica of St. Peter’s Basilica that uses artificial intelligence to explore one of the world’s most important monuments while helping the Holy See manage the flow of visitors and identify conservation issues.
Using 400,000 high-resolution digital photographs, taken with drones, cameras and lasers over four weeks when no one was in the basilica, the digital replica will go online alongside two new exhibits to provide visitors – real and virtual – with an interactive experience.
“It is literally one of the most advanced and sophisticated projects of its kind that has ever been undertaken,” Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, said at a news conference at the Vatican.
The project was launched ahead of the Vatican’s 2025 Jubilee, a holy year in which more than 30 million pilgrims are expected to pass through the basilica’s Holy Door, in addition to the 50,000 who visit on a normal day.
“Everyone, really everyone should feel welcome in this great house,” Pope Francis told Smith and members of the project development teams in an audience Monday.
The digital platform allows visitors to reserve entry times to the basilica, a first for one of the most visited monuments in the world that regularly has a line of tourists waiting hours to enter.
But the heart of the project is the creation of a digital replica of St. Peter’s Basilica through advanced photogrammetry and artificial intelligence that allows anyone to “visit” the church and learn about its history.
The ultra-precise 3D replica, developed in collaboration with digital preservation company Iconem, incorporates 22 terabytes of data, Smith said.
Images have already identified structural damage and signs of deterioration, such as missing mosaic pieces, cracks and fissures invisible to the naked eye, with speed and precision far greater than human capabilities.
Francis has called for the ethical use of artificial intelligence and used his World Peace Message this year to urge an international treaty to regulate it, arguing that technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness was too great. .
On Monday, he thanked the Microsoft team and basilica workers responsible for the project and marveled at how modern technology was helping to spread an ancient faith and preserve a piece of world heritage, which celebrates the 400th anniversary of its consecration in 2026. .
“This house of prayer for all people has been entrusted to us by those who have gone before us in faith and apostolic ministry,” he told Smith and the delegation. “Therefore, it is a gift and a task to care for it, in a spiritual and material sense, even through the latest technologies.”
Smith declined to give an exact figure for Microsoft’s investment in the project, saying only that it was “substantial” and born out of Francisco’s initiative in 2018 to bring together technology companies to promote ethnically aware AI.
He highlighted that Microsoft has carried out similar projects in Mont Saint-Michel in France and in Ancient Olympia, in Greece.