Unlike Egyptian pyramids, the Maya built their temples layer by layer outward, so to understand them, researchers tunneled into the structures to understand the earlier phases of construction. I arranged the guided versions of the virtual tours in a rough chronology, moving from the highest to the lowest and oldest areas: the hieroglyphic stairway composing the largest Maya inscription anywhere, the Rosalila temple that was buried fully intact, and finally the tomb of the Founder of the city, Yax Kʼukʼ Moʼ.
I've been working to build on top of the Matterport SDK with Three.js--and then reusing the data in Unreal for a desktop experience or rendering for film (coming soon to PBS).
Blog about process: https://blog.mused.com/what-lies-beneath-digitally-recording...
Major thanks to the Matterport team for providing support with data alignment and merging tunnels while I was living in the village near site.
I expect whoever coated the remains with that red cinnabar stuff died rather early, probably with tooth and hair loss and severe mental issues. Perhaps this fate was expected but given that "mad hatters" were a thing until fairly recently, people can be a bit strange when it comes to dealing with poisons.
The guide notes point out that only the most sacred rituals involved this red mercurial stuff. I'm not surprised. It might be rare but rarer still will be people willing to deploy it unless that fate is considered a good way to go.
That tour is a remarkable use of the technology.
I was wondering about this too: they've found high levels of mercury in the water supply at Maya cities and believe now it contributed to the eventual collapse: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/mercury-and-algal-bl...
This makes me think: what if today's rulers are being poisoned by something making them act like idiots?
It's ever so hard to try and get inside the minds of people from long ago. I think it is fair to assume that we think in a compatible way with these people and if we can glean enough clues we can reasonably draw conclusions.
It might be informative to look for clues as to what the people who had to deploy this stuff actually thought about it. The amazing carvings, catacombs and so on tell a lot about the Maya people and it seems that they are well interpreted but I don't think that this red poison is particularly well interpreted. I think there is a lot more to be learned.
The archaeology there is absolutely mind blowing. Thank you to everyone involved. Your work is phenomenal.
I’m a 3D artist that is currently encountering staunch resistance of generating 3D models from drone captured photogrammetry of historically protected sites in Pennsylvania, USA.
I’ve had resistance from the state and county level in pursuing take off and landing permission at historical sites. Communicating my intentions of digital historic preservation with photogrammetry has been a difficult “sell”.
I’m a licensed commercial remote pilot - however I need property owner permission to take off and land. Many sites are in state/county owned property in my area.
Another idea: if you don't already have any formal education in history, you could study for some qualifications in the subject. It would probably do much to reassure landowners that you are not going to harm the sites in any way (although I struggle to think of a way you could do so with a UAV!) In any case, good luck; I'd love to see the models!
When I hear "digital" I don't exactly associate long-term preservation with it. Do you also have a strategy for the "digital preservation" part? Websites don't live long. Storage media don't last long either.
Should such a program be made together with a partner that has a strategy for long-term (outlook of centuries) storage of digital content? Because otherwise I don't see the "preservation" aspect. The monuments will likely survive all the digitized data created from them, easily.
It's not just the data, but also ways to use it. Imagine this was done twenty years ago and it was all saved as Adobe Flash media.
I think preserving the digital media plus ensure that it will still be usable (hardware and digital format) is a monumental effort, in comparison creating the digital representation is not the hard part.
Is there a way you could partner with the custodians of a historic site so they become part of the digital preservation effort? Maybe offer a way to embed the 3D model on an official webpage of the historic site? Getting the custodians onboard could smooth the process of getting the required permissions.
Why?
In general we clearly have the technology to capture 4K-8K environments and turn them into very realistic virtual worlds. Is anybody even doing such work? For example capturing a neighborhood in San Francisco (or any city) as it looks in 2024 for historical reference? Seems like that should be a thing.
I've seen high quality environmental scans, even way back in the Silicon Graphics days when they showed an amazing scan of the Sistine Chapel. But it seems to me all such scans wind up in some proprietary player format which was designed by somebody who never played a decent open world game like Fallout 4, Cyberpunk, Battlefield, Red Dead Redemption. I have yet to see a museum environmental scan which gets anywhere near the immersive quality of those games. This is not so much a criticism of such work - it's awsome! - but maybe more of a call to arms for game people to help out the scholars.
Or here's the trailer for the project in Unreal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlNgpG9X7mc
I have a lot of work keeping up with games, it's true--games are expensive to build and aiming at photorealism art style continually looks dated quickly while stylized graphics, less so. I'm trying to fundraise to build this game currently, but it's a tough sell. Educational games don't do well on Steam, so right now, I'm just distributing through my website as I build. The small income this provides helps me contribute back to the modern Egyptian Egyptologists that are excavating and documenting their own culture though.
The latest Game Science title, Black Myth Wukong, does an awesome job with 3d captures of Chinese monuments and bringing the mythology and history to life.
https://free-visit.net
Unfortunately it's a lot of code writing to support rolling shutter cameras strapped to multicopters, where you capture video with short enough exposure to prevent blur. The 3D recovery has to respect the fact that the rows of the image are taken from different positions and angles, causing this up infiltrate basically the entire pipeline.
And global shutter cameras are barely accessible.
If there's some group with the man power and funding to actually pull this off, please get in touch, I would like to pick back up!
This is amazing. Thank you for sharing.
Can you share the technical background you've used for creating the 3D reconstruction? Like software packages, or algorithms used.
Are we looking at the result of packages like OpenSfM here, or COLMAP?
So in the virtual tour, you're seeing 360 imagery from the cameras and a lower resolution version of the 3d capture data, optimized for web. The lower res mesh from the scanner is transparent in first-person view mode so users get cursor effects on top of the 360 image.
For film, PBS sent out a documentary crew, and they wanted me to render some footage of the full tunnel system, so I exported the e57 pointcloud data from Matterport and rendered the clips they needed in Unreal. It should be coming out soon with "In the Americas."
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Maybe it's just that I'm on mobile, and when I went back I then saw the "free explore" button on the top... But maybe would be nice to add a couple prompts like you have at that one point which say something like "feel free to explore around the tunnels and then click next when you're ready to continue" or something (also for the ball court)...
Edit: also very nice tool :)!
I'm confused, mate: why and how would 21st-century professional archaeologists avoid using modern powered tools and techniques? That's absurd, dangerous, and not cost-effective.