Interactive tour of James Clerk Maxwell's house | Hacker News Reader

Interactive tour of James Clerk Maxwell's house

clerkmaxwellfoundation.org

77 pointsjoebig33 comments

If you're ever in Edinburgh, this is an excellent place to visit and spend an afternoon. One of the funniest parts was upon walking in the door, the gentleman who greeted me asked "What kind of engineer are you?" Very worthwhile.

And of course, everyone should go to Edinburgh....

But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream

Fitful and dark,

Unseizable in Leith

And wildered by the Forth,

But irresistibly at last

Cleaving to sombre heights

Of passionate imagining

Till stonily,

From soaring battlements,

Earth eyes Eternity

Where is this from? I find Edinburgh cemetery to be a wierdly welcoming tourist attraction.

It's the poem Edinburgh by Hugh MacDiarmid:

https://nishsrivastava.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/edinburgh-by...

Shamefully, I grew up in Edinburgh, am an EE, my Dad was an EE, also lived in Edinburgh, and I never knew there was a Maxwell house there. I suppose I assumed he only lived on his estate or in Cambridge. There's a statue of him at the end of George St also.

Could have been a good thing you didn't know about it. The house might be haunted by demons.

It's now proven that demons never could have dwelt there.

You can be forgiven for not remembering this, since there's a cost to accumulating information.

Does he ask everyone, or do you just have the je ne sais quoi of an engineer?

He is sorting visitors into two distinct rooms.

There’s a room on the left and another on the right

Ha, kind of makes sense though. I can’t remember where I heard it but there’s a quote about him being the greatest scientist the average person has never heard of or something like that.

I would really like to know what the whole tech stack was to produce this: Which camera system was used to record these images and what platform they used for building the 3D experience?

The pictures must be of insane resolution, as you can zoom in to read even the smallprint on all the posters clearly (imagine Google StreetView like this). And I didn't really notice any stitching, tripods etc.

Also they have cleverly embedded video animations in some of the rooms 360 degree images. These were clearly recorded separately but I still haven't fully figured out how they added them. Very well done and indeed probably almost as good as being there in person.

You could produce this using one of several 360° cameras (e.g. Ricoh Theta, Insta360 X3) for the images, and then using 3D Vista to create the tour experience, embedded media, etc.

I have a friend in real estate who uses matterport [1] to do something similar to this. They have tools to do animations very close to what is happening here. Even the circular cursor looks similar.

1. https://matterport.com/

I've actually done some volunteer work at the James Clerk Maxwell house. The people who run it are great and love to show people around if you want an in-person tour. Just email and they can organise a time.

Did you get to meet that excellent dog that's in the hallway when you enter this tour?

I hope the dog's name is "Daftie" :-)

This type of 360 photo media experience will soon be replaced by 3d gaussian / Nerf realtime render as demonstrated by the Smerf project which was trending yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38632492

Add a VR viewer and the experience will start to be really close to seeing the real thing...

I wonder if, at some point, there might not be a push back from museum and tourist attractions against using too immersive virtual experience for fear of hurting the number of actual visitors. (Although I guess, they could just charge for the virtual access to make up for an eventual loss).

An interactive tour of the JCMB would be somewhat pedestrian. Presumably a tour of the DHT ends with asbestos and a leaky rooftop view

The David Hume Tower has been renamed 40 George Square.

Yes, along with seemingly every other building in that corner. Caused me some confusion at first.

For the benefit of others JCMB is the James Clerk Maxwell building, which is part of the Edinburgh university campus.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/biology/study-with-us/undergraduate/deg...

DHT is the "David Hume Tower", which has now been renamed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_George_Square

I have happy memories of both.

It's very stylish and tasteful!

It looks like the house of someone who was very wealthy by at least today's standards, but I see that he came from a comfortable but not rich family.

Curious, wouldn't a home like that be considered wealthy? Certainly it looks like something that would need staff to keep up when it was a household.

Those houses £2-3m+. Here's [0] the first one I found in the same area-ish. [0] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/139059236#/?channel=R...

I was there earlier this year, well worth a visit - try to make it to one of their guided tours, I believe they have two per day.

I wonder if Oliver Heaviside's house still remains. He rewrote Maxwell's equations in the form we used today.

Well, a house he inhabited does survive: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/olive...

I'd like to know if the pictures on the wall were there (and in the same place) when he lived there.

The place has been remodeled as a museum. So, authenticity as in true-to-his-time is evidently somewhat diminished. But plenty of info pertaining to provenance is provided upon clicking the wall pictures. The portraits of Maxwell's numerous scientific contemporaries will obviously would not have been there during his years.

On my android phone this is like touring Maxwell's house on DMT while drunk. The image is spinning round like crazy and hugely over-sensitive. Enjoyable though

Disable the gyro controls (open the settings at bottom left and tap on the cellphone icon). Then you can navigate normally.

The online tour of renowned physicist Maxwell's house in Edinburgh. UI is responsive & attractive. Lots of trivia and tidbits scattered about the house like Easter eggs to click on!

Looks very inaccurate. When I go there I would have expected to be able to experience the house as James Clerk Maxwell would have, and therefore give me more of a sense of getting to know him by experiencing what he would have experienced on a daily basis.

Why would I go to his house to look at posters giving information, makes no sense I could look at that information from home no need to go all the way to his actual house.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com