Viewers around the world can see the site of the first ever Olympic Games as it looked in its prime more than 2,000 years ago thanks to a digital reconstruction. 'Ancient Olympia: Common Grounds' stems from collaboration between the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport and Microsoft's AI for Cultural Heritage initiative. Microsoft teamed with tech firm Iconem to take hundreds of thousands of images of the ancient site as it lies today -- both with ground- and drone-based cameras. These were processed by Microsoft AI to create models so precise they are photo-realistic and from which the ancient monuments could be digitally reconstructed. The first games took place in Olympia in 776 BC, and recurred every four year until at least AD 393 and they perhaps continued until the Temple of Zeus burnt in 425 AD.

Digital models of humans can be uncannily accurate these days, but there's at least one area where they fall short: teeth. Unless you're willing to scan the inside of someone's mouth, you aren't going to get a very faithful representation of someone's pearly whites. Disney Research and ETH Zurich, however, have a far easier solution. They've just developed a technique to digitally recreate teeth beyond the gum line using little more than source data and everyday imagery. The team used 86 3D scans to create a model for an "average" set of teeth, and wrote an algorithm that adapts that model based on what it sees in the contours of teeth in photos and videos.