“Borobudur is a place where man meets the divine within himself,” says Titus Leber of the Buddhist temple that sits 40 kilometers from Yogyakarta in Magelang, Central Java.

For most tourists, a visit to the temple, which first came to European attention in 1814, takes less than a day. However, for Leber, an Austrian-born writer, director and multimedia creator, it took significantly longer.

He spent four years developing Borobudur: Paths to Enlightenment, a virtual encyclopedia cataloging all of the stories depicted on every one of the temple’s panels.

“In every sense of the word, Borobudur is a gold mine,” he said.

It is the largest Buddhist complex in the world. The temple, designated a UNESCO landmark, has 1,460 bas-reliefs that depict more than 15,000 characters.

Since restoration, work at the complex began, Borobudur has become a major site for Buddhists and a destination for local and international tourists.

Leber was inspired to digitize the wisdom of the temple’s panels for pilgrims and tourists who might not understand the rich stories contained therein.

“People look at Borobudur and see a pile of dead stones — like an archeological artifact,” Leber says. “But it’s not only a story in pictures. Borobudur is actually the equivalent of a large Hollywood movie.”

Visitors, Leber says, “leave the temple being aware they saw something fantastic but having not a clue what it was”.

The encyclopedia took four years to finish: two years onsite at Borobudur capturing and cataloging images and two years in post-production.

Leber said that he told officials at PT Taman Wisata Candi Borobudur, the private firm that manages the temple complex, that the project they offered him would be painstaking. “I said, ‘If I do this project I do it thoroughly’.”

Leber, who has a doctorate in art history, began his career as a film director later moving into multimedia, producing work for the Louvre museum, IBM and the royal court of Thailand.

He continues: “Looking back now, it’s a miracle that we completed it. If this wasn’t a government project we never could have done it.”

The final project is immense, including 65 Gigabytes of data. It includes 400 interactive files that offer viewers 360-degree panoramic views of aspects of the temple.

Viewers can explore the temple virtually, stopping to watch a slew of high-definition video sequences accompanied by the original texts that inspired the builders of the temple.

According to Leber, the process was labor intensive. “We wanted our animation to consist only of original characters taken directly from the stone carvings on the temple walls. Each one of them needed to be die-cut, isolated and then to be animated along with a specially-composed soundtrack in several hundred layers of superimposed imagery.”

<)