Virtual tour of the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses VI | Hacker News Reader

Virtual tour of the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses VI

my.matterport.com

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There are a load of these that I found - source https://twitter.com/tourismandantiq

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=d42fuVA21To

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=QaGBAsT6yg4&mls=1

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=ui3dfrQDqB2&mls=1

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=xmDbt2rfa82&help=1&brand=1...

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=PKxweZaPG3P&help=1&brand=1...

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=zBpDdPqxTKz

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=o5Ex5Xo7UkE

Absolutely fascinating! I have always wanted to visit these sort of things in real life but the political climate in the past decade or so has put me off. Shame - this is a great alternative though.

I really wish more places would do this sort of thing! Google does some, but I like the quality of these.

Thaanks!

Oh my. Thank you for finding these. I would pay a fair bit of money to have a docent of some sort take me around these places in VR.

I can't actually visit Egypt anytime soon.

Agreed: it is amazing to just have these in 3D.

However as someone who doesn't know much about ancient Egypt it would be spectacular to have some kind of annotations or guide to explain what we are seeing.

Some of them do have some more info bubble that you can click on, e.g. https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=d42fuVA21To

If you've got a PC headset this is pretty good: https://store.steampowered.com/app/861400/Nefertari_Journey_...

Thanks for posting these! I made a few of them. I'm glad people are enjoying them! To keep adding to the list, here's the set I worked on:

Islamic Art History and Architecture: Bab Zuwayla gate, museum, and minaret: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=YZXMPtiuR9D (http://arce.org/) Faraj Ibn Barquq Mosque: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=UCDj6MdbCes (http://arce.org/) Aslam al Silahdar Mosque: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=YsCSsrvXMQS (http://arce.org/) Masjid Altinbugha al-Maridani: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=C9MTVJbf62k

Coptic Art History and Architecture: St. Anthony’s Museum: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=FBdkHbQzzVJ (http://arce.org/) St. Anthony’s Chapel: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=c4j6knCMvww (http://arce.org/)

Eastern Orthodox: St. Catherine’s Monastery Museum: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=1HLpFZqfcov

Pharonic Egyptian Tombs: Giza: Tomb of Queen Meresankh III (G 7530-7540): https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=d42fuVA21To Mastaba of Idu (G 7102): https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-mastaba-of-idu-g-7102-e8... Mastaba of Qar (G 7101): https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-mastaba-of-qar-g-7101-3b... Iasen (in G 4920): https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=xkMDSQQL1GF G 6010 Mastaba of Neferbauptah: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=aSQfQx9Mkyj G 8662 (Sedhetep): https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=53NUC71SV3w Mastaba Tomb of Khufukhaf I (G 7130-7140): https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=CaEcwJ7Z2HV G8670 (Hassan's 'Mastaba F', Selim Hassan, Giza III, 72-75): https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=DKSVgKEnY9n

Luxor: Tomb of Menna: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=vLYoS66CWpk (http://arce.org/)

Hellenistic Sicily / Magna Graecia: Villa Romana del Casale - Basilica and North Rooms: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=fd75qjJG9Dp Villa Romana del Casale - Peristyle: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=VhSC8qsGVLe Villa Romana del Casale - East Rooms: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=3bjZH1vAkVj Morgantina - the North Baths: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=UjDknPgHBF2

Super cool, can you explain a bit how you make these?

Here is a review of one of systems that does this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Re-uxp5-gU

For the Matterport scans specifically, I used a Matterport Pro 2 camera here: https://matterport.com/cameras/pro2-3D-camera and for the photogrammetry, a capture process similar to this: https://medium.com/realities-io/getting-started-with-photogr... Writing up more details into a blog.

For some more about what we do in general in the digital humanities for preserving cultural heritage, there's some info at my startup's website also! https://archimedes.digital/

Awesome - thanks for this and your work! I'd love to hear a bit more about the production of these sort of things (any "behind the scenes" info etc) if you have any interesting stories and time to share them here ... I am sure I would not be alone :-)

Thanks, I'll get a blog together!

Thank you for this, and all of your work. There are many places you've shot and produced like this that we will never be able to get to, and this is a true joy to spend time in.

If you are interested, I am trying to build an open source database for places with virtual tour.

Website: https://gez.la

I am currently working on this alone. Anyone interested is welcome to help :)

https://github.com/stfurkan/gez

Beautiful! Is it safe to assume you'll (eventually) add the links in this thread there?

Thanks. I will try to add them as soon as possible.

Take a look at HistoryView.org We have over 700 virtual tours of museums, art galleries, and historic sites for free

Good job.There are lots of museum.Where did you find all of these museums?

Thanks. I am searching them online. It take some time to find and add a new place but I hope it will worth the effort.

Doubly impressive: there are spots you can visit in the vtour, that you cannot see in real life because they're outside the pedestrian walkway.

Example: https://photos.app.goo.gl/NXdDoDTnNXJgkr8X9

I'm sure the guards there would encourage you have the privilege of a view from off the pedestrian walkway for a tip.

> guards would allow you to go off the pedestrian walkway for a tip

Actually, no. The guards (in the Valley anyway) take their jobs very seriously and have seen it all... you'll get unceremoniously removed for trying to break a rule.

While Egypt is generally loose in this regard, they are super strict about few things. Sharm Elsheikh's reef come to my mind.

Did you catch the beheaded bound people depicted at ground level around what I assume is a stone coffin?

Tried to research what the meaning / story is for these figures. My best guess with 10 minute googling is that they represent defeated enemies.

Spectacular. It's well lit, and has a smooth experience.

And in one way, this virtual tour is better than the live one- at the end you can step past the guardrails! Check it out (deep link to show it wasn't possible, so just walk or click to the end of the long hall to see what I mean).

Anyone know other tours like this?

There are several linked from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities' Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/tourismandantiq

https://free-visit.net ( I'm cheating : It's my service )

This is amazing.

Anyone knows how Matterport works? Does it extract the 3d meshes from 360 photos?

Seems like a combination of 360 photography and off-the-shelf photogrammetry algorithms. Don't know if there is some secret sauce needed (not obvious from the content that there would be).

Well, do you know where these shelves are? I'd be interested in photogrammetry software to reconstruct 3D models of environments, mostly to plan construction or aesthetic changes to buildings or surroundings. This is for home use, so I don't really need fancy texturing, etc. But having it reconstructed from a smartphone video feed would be a must.

I looked for open source software a while back, but didn't really turn out interesting results :/

Edit: there seems to be a few interesting resources. It looks like MicMac could be quite simple to use, and desn't have a CUDA dependency, for instance.

If you want to investigate free software options then may I suggest you look into Visual SFM (http://ccwu.me/vsfm/) or AliceVision MeshRoom (https://alicevision.org/). I haven't used MicMac, might be good as well.

I tried several years cheap approaches as you requested with no luck. Then I upscaled my gear.

I've used Agisoft's Metashape with great success (https://www.agisoft.com/). The cheaper license offers really good functionality as is.

DICE has published a pretty good intro into how to use it to capture photogrammetry data in https://www.ea.com/frostbite/news/photogrammetry-and-star-wa....

You do want to have a good camera for good results. My Mavic Pro's (a drone) 12 MP is barely tolerable. With Sony Alpha 6000 (24MP) and good lens, the results are fantastic. Camera phone can work, depending on the capabilities of the camera, but I would use photography and not video material - the images from photography seem to be better quality than frames extracted from video (YMMV).

If you have the patience to collect the image material, the results can be really good.

For example, as a hobby I've been collecting photogrammetry models from an office building being built near my home:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/hatsina-20200426-bdd04329548...

So what you see there is the model as presented by Sketchfab. The textures and model are coming from Agisoft Metashape, Sketchfab is just used as a platform to display the model for public viewing.

The data closer to ground is captured by my Sony Alpha 6000 while the data from above is from drone. I'm happy with the portions of model based on 24MP DSRL images but the drone based material does loook "melted" occasionally.

As a reference, the source data for that model was roughly 800 images.

The data the photogrammetry algorithms consume are coming from the pixel data. More pixels, the better the outcome. Roughly, the resolution and precision you can expect from the result mesh is equivalent to the pixel density of your source material. The algorithms don't invent anything that they can't see in the pictures. This means, that for example for columns you need to take 360 of tens of images around each column to make them appear ok in the model.

It's been a few years but in my photogrammetry days the open source options were very unfriendly to use -- either a command line utility lacking documentation or an extension for an outdated version of something else, and I never got a result I was happy with. it can take a couple of hours to process large photo sets and it's really frustrating to get a bad result.

For $180 (non commercial license) Agisoft Photoscan worked the first time and gave me lots of tools to get a good, meshed and textured result that I could export to other software for viewing.

Smart phone cameras are actually ideal because their tiny sensors give huge depth of field -- everything is in focus in every picture == happy stitching

EDIT: you'll be waiting a long time for alignment without GPU !

Glad you like it!

Matterport's camera uses a mixture of structured light, deep learning, and other techniques to build a 3D point cloud from each capture. Then, the app aligns the different captures together to produce a 3D mesh.

It's also possible to use consumer 360 cameras with Matterport's app, though accuracy is lower. In this case, the 3D-from-2D estimation primarily happens using deep learning.

You can learn more here: https://matterport.com/how-it-works https://matterport.com/cameras

Matterport is a YC company from way back in 2012.

I would like to see this done for Chernobyl.

Not sure i'd be volunteering to put a tripod down all over the place!

Could probably be done with some sort of drone rig.

I think it would depend what sort of penetration you're after.

It was not possible to work with robots in/around the reactor in the immediate aftermath of the accident -- the robots would fail due to exposure to the radiation. It's quite possible that technology still hasn't advanced far enough to allow for the in-depth exploration that would be required to achieve anything like the linked example.

I'd be curious to know if anyone knows more about recent attempts and the state of the art of hardening robots, drones, computers, etc. against radiation.

There's Streetview in Pripyat [1] but not in the Nuclear plant itself apart from a handful of images [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4065351,30.0580859,2a,60y,35...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3894109,30.0990984,3a,75y,16...

Well, I would like to see directly into the Nuclear plant itself please.

Probably not feasible as the radiation fries any circuit getting close. They tried to get a camera in many times, but never succeeded I think.

Striking how _different_ this is from the pyramid of Giza. For this one, every inch covered with illustrations and hieroglyphs; for the great pyramid, completely bare, devoid of images.

To be fair it might as well have been flashy on the outside, but erosion of the surface exposed to the elements (and sandstorms) is very high. We supposedly already know that it was covered in limestone, and some sources even mention looting of the limestone to build forts

The dollhouse view is a nice way to zoom out without occluding what you want to see. Very impressed how smooth and detailed the tour is. So much better than streetview based tours

That's beautiful. It's just begging for translation overlays on the exquisite wall detail.

Before High Fidelity VR shut down they were doing tours with an Egyptologist tour-guide of another tomb which was really cool.

High Fidelity missed the Coronavirus WFH opportunity by only months. They claim to still be working on something new but, wow, its hard to think of a case of worse timing.

Beautiful! I had this same system shown to me for a couple of houses I was looking at buying last year, the real estate agent had these photos taken in the house and stitched together this way with a dolls house view too. Very useful for that kind of application.

Combined with VR glasses it would be a great way to preview things like furniture/new kitchen layouts in somewhere like Ikea or paint colours in a hardware store.

The picture/texture quality is mind-blowingly amazing.

Imagine if video games had textures this high-definition!! They'd look so insanely good. And it's not like our present-day technology/GPUs can't handle it. It's probably more that video game makers don't want to spend a huge amount of money on artists and graphics people to create ultra-high-definition textures...

Take a look at HistoryView.org We have over 700 virtual tours of museums, art galleries, and historic sites for free

I visited the valley of the kings ten years ago. This is a really good recreation: before I went I had no idea how well preserved the paintings in some of the tombs were. It's an amazing place to visit.

It’s amazing how vivid the blue paint deep into the tomb has remained.

Really interesting, the transitions remind me of Myst [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst

Anyone able to access this via Firefox and VR? It seems to launch SteamVR with my WMR headset active, but no content - and no VR button on the web UI (which the help mentions).

The pictures here are very well lit -- anyone know how they achieved this? There do not seem to be visible lights in the photos.

There is an LED lighting system alongside the walkways, at floor level. It probably isn't original.

Why are parts of the tunnel blurred out? Censorship? Surely it isn't anything objectionable we wouldn't see on Wikipedia or Google Image search.

Censorship of educational material is unnecessary.

Edit: it appears to blur the textures immediately above on the y axis. Perhaps the software isn't correctly interpolating those values even though it has the data. I hope this is the case rather than the censorship I posited.

This is really cool, and I hope more things become accessible in this fashion.

Probably just a hardware blind spot, this is quite common to find on panoramic views (google street view, etc). Interesting that it sits above, rather than below the capturing apparatus, as it usually does: the tripod gets in the way. Maybe they lifted it from above?

For some reason, I am getting motion sickness while clicking around. But it's really detailed and cool.

Me too. Wonder if a VR version would be less nauseating.

It's probably the smooth acceleration/deceleration. I bet if the movement was a straight ramp instead of a smooth curve you'd feel better.

Try and spot a lookalike of the chinese character 大 in this tomb...interesting...

I wonder how old the greek graffiti in there is?

its awesome, although at first i thought i was going to see it as it used to be. that would be a neat project

Bookmarking for tomorrow

I did come back today guys :-)

Worth the time too! I really wish Egypt were safer for single female travelers. Or just safer for travelers in general.

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