Bali Digital Heritage Initiative (BADHI)

Bali Digital Heritage Initiative (BADHI)

Status

Ongoing

Funded by

Whyte Fund. 2024 - 2025

The BADHI project empowers Balinese communities to document their cultural heritage, particularly temples, for future generations. Documenting Balinese temples is challenging because of the scale (there are 5,000+ temples), variation (from small family temples to a large temple complex), and the sacred values embedded into the temple.  We believe a participatory approach — data by people for people — is the best way to achieve documentation that is scalable, sustainable and culturally safe.

Bali Digital Heritage Initiative Cover

Balinese temples have undergone cycles of destruction and reconstruction for hundreds of years. With each recreation, we have lost the authenticity of past architecture and values, and before 2024, there had been no serious effort to create records of the temples for future generations. We aim to create a record for generations over the next 50 years, 100 years and beyond.

Bali map
There are more than 5,000 temples in Bali that are vulnerable to natural disasters. Source: https://map.badhi.id.

Our approach is centred around community participation. Local communities contribute videos of temples and temple parts in their areas. We then use these videos to create high-quality 3D records of the temples. The videos, 3D models and metadata of the temples are all looped back to the communities. We envision the data collection campaign that runs every 5 years where, for a number of months, everyone in Bali contributes video records.

Bali Digital Heritage Initiative
Public temples can be seen and contributed to by anyone. This figure shows the 3D model of the great gates of Pura Sari Abangan, reconstructed from community contributions. This temple was built between the 8th and 11th centuries.

BADHI is a collaborative effort between the Embodied Visualisation Research Group (EmVis) at Monash University and the Virtual Vision, Image, and Pattern Research Group (VVIP) at the Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha. In the early stage of our project, we also collaborated with recordkeeping experts at the Digital Transformation Research Group (Monash University) and action research experts at the Action Lab (Monash University).

Learn more

Related projects

  • Cultural reconnection through immersive visualisations. I Gede Mahendra Darmawiguna. 2025 - present. PhD Project.
  • Apple Vision Pro immersive temple viewer. MNET student project led by Neharika Shimpiger. 2025 - present.
  • WebXR temple viewer. Jaylen Navurunnage. FIT3144 project. 2025.
  • Gaussian Splatting Pipeline exploration. Anthony Wilson. FIT3161. 2024.

Dissemination

  • 3D Gaussian Splatting for Archival of Balinese Temples from Community-Sourced Videos. 2025. Anthony Wilson, Arnadi Murtiyoso, Bernhard Jenny, I Gede Mahendra Darmawiguna, Putu Hendra Suputra, Thomas Chandler, Made Windu Antara Kesiman, Kadek Ananta Satriadi. Published at  IEEE International Conference on Imaging Systems and Techniques. Strasbourg, France. https://doi.org/10.1109/IST66504.2025.11268436. [ Research paper ]
  • ‘3D Gaussian Splatting’: Teknologi inovatif untuk membuat arsip digital 3 dimensi seluruh pura di Bali. 2025. Kadek Ananta Satriadi, I Gede Mahendra Darmawiguna, Made Windu Antara Kesiman, Thomas Chandler, Bernhard Jenny, Putu Hendra Suputra. Published at The Conversation Indonesia. [ Online article ]
  • Satriadi, K. A. (2025, March 21). Participatory Digital Archiving of Balinese Temples. Fakultas Ilmu Budaya (FIB) DigiTalk, Online. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15770772. [ Online presentation ]
  • Darmawiguna, I.G.M, (2025, January 14th). Pemanfaatan Gaussian Splatting Untuk Digitalisasi 3D dan Preservasi Pura Bali Dalam Project BADHI. Webinar Undiksha Berbagi. Online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnJALbu6-ow&t=3074s

Researchers