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Show HN: I 3D scanned the tunnels inside the Maya Pyramid Temples at Copan

(mused.com)
322 points lukehollis | 3 comments | 15 Oct 24 12:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

With these 3d captures, you can explore the 4km tunnel system that archaeologists created inside the temples at Copan that are closed to the public. The tunnels are often flooded by hurricanes and damaged by other natural forces--and collapsed on me and my Matterport scanner more than once--so this is a permanent record of how they appeared in 2022-23.

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.

1. programd ◴[15 Oct 24 21:44 UTC] No.41853432[source]▶
I'm glad to hear you're working on getting an Unreal environment for these scans. I find the movement in the web version to be incredibly clunky. This really needs to have a game like environment to do it justice.

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 For example capturing a neighborhood in San Francisco (or any city) as it looks in 2024 for historical reference?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.

replies(2): >>41853553 #>>41854040 #
2. namibj ◴[15 Oct 24 22:00 UTC] No.41853553[source]▶
I was working towards that aiming at the medieval city of Rothenburg o.d.T. in Germany.

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!

3. lukehollis ◴[15 Oct 24 23:08 UTC] No.41854040[source]▶
You can download or test the Unreal version pixel streaming here: https://mused.com/netherworld-ancient-egyptian-afterlife-sim...

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.