Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL
persepolis.getty.edu
persepolis.getty.edu
It's a really cool project. Now I want a VR game where I could simply walk around ancient cities and watch people go about their day.
Jimmy Carr joked about that in QI once, how movies and series set in ancient Rome and Greece also tend to do this.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/Ae...
The nearby Naqsh-e Rostam (tombs of Darius and Xerxes among other things) was also stunning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqsh-e_Rostam
(apparently Herodotus also had a list of wonders, but it didn't survive. Given his interest in Persia though, I suspect it would've had several Persian monuments on it)
I think if it were alive today, presentations like this Getty one would be common. As much information as Wikipedia has, it's presented in a very static way, which is a shame. There's huge potential of making the information there interactive, and thus more appealing to younger generations (and everyone, really) who otherwise wouldn't read an article with thousands of words and some pictures and audio.
But I had to keep clicking every time a new scene loaded, which I consider an unforced error. I'm always so impressed with the level of effort that goes into these types of projects, but so baffled that so many obvious issues always seem to slip by somehow! My guess is that some issue with the scroll hijacking made this difficult to fix, like maybe a loader framework resets the focus and they didn't have an easy way to modify its code or something.
There are many other small interaction cues that are expertly done, bringing in various optional jump-off points (e.g. viewing the same scene present day) without breaking continuity to explicitly teach anything. Another example: highlighting text on in-scene plaques as they're read (with high quality voice-acting). This is a well thought through experience.
Remember that those games have budgets of tens of millions of dollars and are built by literally hundreds artists and programmers. Animation is very time consuming (and hence expensive) so it’s no wonder to me that the creators of this project opted for a static scene, this way they could deliver something cool more quickly instead of dragging this project for months and risking cancelling it due to lack of funds to finish it.
I would like having something like this with virtual reality glasses to visit historic sites like Roman Forum, Pompeia, Delphic Panhellenic Sanctuary, the Aqueduct of Segovia, The Roman theatre of Mérida...
If a tenth of the money spend in games were spend in make such a projects...
https://inculture.microsoft.com/arts/ancient-olympia-common-...
and I very much like the sound effects.
When you're between scenes with descriptions you can pan around by dragging the mouse. I'm hoping they extend this to allow free walking around.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/persian-collections-...
Leave them there, take care of them there. Stop thinking everything from poor nations is up for grabs.
Which clearly isn’t happening, so IMO it makes sense to store them in a stable society with enforced property rights.
Doesn’t have to be UK or France.
Dr. Mossadeqh was not running a "democracy". Post WWII Iran's political space was far more complex than the caricature presented since the fall of the Shah, and sans British instigated support for counter-coup to remove Mossadegh with help from USA, a quite significant chunk of Iranian military and society, including the Clergy (who were already using terror in Iran, btw), agreed with the American analysis that Mossadegh would merely precede a Soviet controlled Tudeh takeover of Iran.
Unfortunately, half the comments will be a shallow dismissal about the scrolling, but that's typical HN.
Perhaps it just doesn't stack the renders - if it did, changing view would decrease the image quality back to low samples, maybe that's the reason...
Plus someone probably decided it would look cool...
Does anyone know how many of those colors are believed to be historically accurate representations vs artistic license? The paint has long since faded, but perhaps the colors have been identified through some kind of anlysis?
There was a recent article here on HN which made me realize the importance of communicating what colors are scientifically or historically accurate vs artistic license.
"Guys lets make a video but where you have to keep scrolling to make it play! That will be fun!"
Impressive rendering and interface but they should have thought about the UI a bit more.
I don't understand why a lot of scrolling would be problematic, doesn't seem different then e.g. pushing arrow keys over and over when playing a video game.
In this website you need to keep scrolling, which is pretty monotonous, it would be equivalent of spamming "next" on an overly complicated late 2000s Windows software installer. Or watching a Youtube video by spamming the frame skip shortcut.
If you want to make a scroll interactive experience (please don't), then at least do the courtesy of having 1 scroll gesture = 1 piece of information, don't have users scroll their wheels like 6 times just to wade through a path slowly. Or at the very least support the page up/down buttons!
Look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ52fo5g03Q. I even accidentally skipped over some text sections because I was scrolling furiously to be able to go anywhere. Finally, I accidentally used the tilt key of my scroll wheel and it went to the previous page, and I had to start all over.
Or scrolling through a long document, as the scroll wheel is designed to do?
You're not supposed to scroll straight through, there's stuff to see and read! If you want to skip around, there's navigation on the right side.
And it does with a reasonable speed configurable by the user, which is easily mentally mapped to how much it will move since it's just a 2D surface. For example, I have mine set so each full scroll gesture (as you see in the video) is mapped to a whole screenful of movement. So I know that a complete scroll will show me all new information.
Scrolling through this path, each segment has different lengths and speeds, so you need trial and error to reach a specific point. And then sometimes it's just an animation and your scroll doesn't matter beyond initiating it. Not to mention that it's roughly 3 full scrolls to reach a new POI, the in-between is just transition.
> [...] there's stuff to see [...]
There is not [any more stuff to see thanks to the scrolling], because I can't look around, so it's just a video that wastes more GPU power.
> [...] and read!
Yes! And I skip right through some of it because when there is not a text in sight, I need to spam the wheel to get anywhere and overshoot.
> If you want to skip around, there's navigation on the right side.
True, but it's a miserable experience, since I have to hover each dot individually to know what it's about, as they don't show up on the overview map.
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Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing recreation full of very interesting information, it's just presented in the most frustrating possible way to use it. Take heart to the interactive medium, give me WASD and mouse-look! (Or at least a Google Steet View like spherical navigation, since it's probably more accessible) Let me go and walk to a corner so I can look back and see the full scale of the architecture, or wander among the columns of the great halls! This is so much wasted potential just in terms of interactivity.
> I can't look around, so it's just a video that wastes more GPU power.
Fwiw, you can drag to look around most scenes. (Although I actually don't think this added much and agree that using WebGL was probably wasteful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965352)
I tried with trackpad and mouse on my end, and the app is well-configured for both of my devices at least: I'm able to have fine-grained control over my location by making small adjustments to scroll position.
I think it's a success. Only tried touchpad scrolling. It's tactile and works.
A conventional video would mean loosing the ability to drag to look around, but I'm not convinced that this was a significant part of the experience—IIRC, they don't even tell you that it's possible. Alternately, Getty could have sent a 360° video, at the cost of even more bandwidth.
> made the experience smoother on low-end devices, possibly at the cost of bandwidth
Especially in the context of low-end devices, I don't think the cost of bandwidth should be discounted here.
Since they'd still be working from a 3D scene, they could easily render ten different videos (or twenty, or thirty) and send a different one depending on the device.
> Especially in the context of low-end devices, I don't think the cost of bandwidth should be discounted here.
I agree, which is why I'm not positive they did the wrong thing, I'm just skeptical.
The thing is, it's not as though their current approach is particularly light on bandwidth. They appear to be downloading many (all?) of the models and textures ahead of time, which makes sense, since it's hard to predict what will be visible in the viewport first. By contrast, videos naturally lend themselves to incremental streaming.
We're also pretty good at compressing videos these days, and a lot of AAA video games are significantly larger than even movies on BluRay (although I admit, I've never quite grokked how this can be.)
So, I'd be interested to see the bandwidth comparison. It's not entirely obvious to me which would win out.
It should end up as exactly the same experience, except possibly without the ability to turn all the way around, depending on whether or not they want to spend bandwidth on a 360° stream. (They would still need to send a slightly larger FOV than the viewport for their little mouse look effect.)
Animation and graphics is quite expensive to develop, since iterations in the development loop can take quite some time (think: do a few changes, render everything, start up the animation, check if it looks right, repeat).
The trilingual inscription of King Xerxes at the main gate reminds me a lot, in tone, to Ramesses II's words in Shelley's famous poem "Ozymandias".
At the end of the game, you have an option to "explore and learn". In this mode, there would be no fighting and you are given a guided tour through ancient Egypt. This is truly the most fascinating moment in my gaming life. The other one would be wandering aimlessly in Microsoft Encatar exploring mode.
I couldn't wait to experience all this again in a truly HD VR world. Maybe some day!
I came to think about something I heard just this week: A city without people is not at all like itself, it's just a bunch of buildings.
So while the walk-through is amazing, to really "be there" in this palace, we'd have to see/imagine the people being there as well. Might be a tricky task for a visualization, but I'm sure it can be attempted!
They made 2 documentary films out of it, the first as interviews with the archeaologists, and then this one 2006 as a 12min 3D rendered walkthrough movie. The Getty WEBGL version is just taken from this old model, with better resolution and lightning. They are constantly changing the colors, due to ongoing internal fights/theories.
You really need to compare it to the classical greek architecture (the Artemis temple of Ephesos from the same period), and the very similar older egyptian 1000 column halls, and the babylonian/assyrian palaces.
The population of a city spanned a wide economic range, but if you want to talk about an "average person", cities didn't exist.
Where are our modern equivalent of marvels like Persians from ~500 B.C !
IMO, in highly experiential websites like this, there's something very tactile about scrolling to move.
If you're going to make it look like a first-person perspective game, it needs to act that way.
Tried it on a PC. It's close to useless, unfortunately.
Too bad, these other efforts elsewhere to create 3D models of ancient cities work fine both on a PC and Android tablets.
There’s a set of accessibility options; maybe they could add some alternative navigation methods.
Designers, who think that this is a good idea to waste people's time like this, shouldn't be allowed anywhere near computers.
Presenting an interactive experience and then taking away all control from the user and replacing it with an extremely frustrating navigation mode (hint, not everyone is using a phone/tablet or laptop touchpad - try to scroll that much with a mouse!) is just stupid and completely wasting the potential of the medium.
Yes. Does that matter? This particular work has terrible, user-hostile navigation controls, and needs to support free movement.
We could play Quake 2 in the browser several years ago, so it's not an unreasonable thing to ask for.
Excellent work in general!
Edit: I should mention that I only tried Chrome
Edit 2: Also tried Firefox on my Android device. It was noticeably slower but still worked.