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

(mused.com)
462 points lukehollis | 2 comments | 15 Oct 24 12:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.436s | 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. JSoet ◴[16 Oct 24 20:40 UTC] No.41863628[source]▶
Fantastic work! Just a small suggestion, I didn't realize that you could free explore the entire area until coming back and reading the comments on this site, I realized you could look around and there was one point in the guides tour where it mentioned you can explore but at least for me I didn't realize you could explore everywhere (especially the tunnels afterwards)

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)...

replies(1): >>41863667 #
2. lukehollis ◴[16 Oct 24 20:44 UTC] No.41863667[source]▶
Thanks for letting me know! That makes good sense, and I did this in other tours. I'll see what I can do.