The immersive digital exhibition Exploring Dunhuang now lets users light a lamp on their phones and explore Cave 285, home to classic flying apsaras and murals blending Chinese and Western styles. These millennium-old artworks have gained "digital avatars" through AI and 3D technologies.

The Dunhuang Academy began its digitalization efforts in the 1980s. To date, it has completed high-precision data collection for 323 caves, 3D structural scanning for 251 caves, and panoramic roaming production for 227 caves. On-screen clarity now exceeds on-site viewing, revealing details once visible only from ladders.

The immersive VR experience in Cave 285 offers a 1:1 high-definition restoration, enabling visitors to view murals up close, explore freely in 360 degrees, and even "fly" over the cave ceiling.

Digital tech also aids conservation: high-resolution cameras on tracks capture images of curved walls, while AI models trained on thousands of negatives detect cracks and hollow layers finer than a hair, using spectral analysis for early warnings.

Generative AI has reinterpreted classic symbols like apsaras, deer, and lotuses into dynamic illustrations via mini-programs. The Digital Library Cave platform, with over 11,000 digitized relics and 728,000 images, offers translation and summarization tools and has drawn more than 250,000 visits from 33 countries.

In July 2025, the academy launched a digital-intelligence lab to further integrate AI, big data, and VR for research on Dunhuang culture and overseas artifacts.

Yu Tianxiu, deputy director of the Dunhuang Academy, said that the next step is to deepen the integration of Dunhuang studies with digital intelligence and build a research platform to ensure the enduring vitality.