Saint Peter Basilica digital experience | Hacker News Reader

Saint Peter Basilica digital experience

virtual.basilicasanpietro.va

114 pointsmatco1123 comments

The AI narration is annoying, with awkward pauses and occasional mispronunciations. For example, it described the motto "urbi et orbi" as "urb-eye e.t. orbee".

Movement is very jerky (maybe because of my old computer?) and I was disappointed that I could only roam freely around the wireframe model, not any of the photographic images. Because of the jerkiness, it was sometimes hard to tell what part of the architecture I was looking at.

Instant mute for me...

As someone that is not very religious, it is still a site to behold in person.

The necropolis of Roman tombs, over which the Basilica was built, and what is claimed to be Peter's Tomb, can actually be visited, deep in the bowels of the Basilica. To do so one must sign up for the Scavi Tour and book well in advance as only very small groups are taken.

I have been there. It was exceptionally dim/dark I couldn’t see anything. I know I was five feet away from the wall with a niche where Peter’s bones is.

The story was that the original church was built by Emperor Constantine on top of Peter’s tomb. When the basilica was built about a thousand years later. Peter’s bones were moved to its current location a few hundred yards away.

This video gives a glimpse of the jeweled box and Peter’s bones. https://youtu.be/DhnJgAzSHD8

I agree, it was very dark. They prohibit photography but some people manage to take a few pics or videos, like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwDqKWMLSIM

A detailed and lengthy explanation of the necropolis, excavations, and findings is available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kN-6smut2A

    Video unavailable
    The uploader has not made this video available in your country

FFS

Australia FWIW

Please try this one https://youtu.be/oHUGNWPGCoY

For any heathens like me, the history makes a lot more sense when you know that Simon and Peter are the same person. It chops and changes with no explanation.

Jesus gave Simon a new name saying you will be the rock of my new church. Peter is anglicized Petros or rock in Greek.

The story is that Jesus spoke Aramaic. He would address Simon as Kepha. But the early gentile Christians wrote in Greek the language of the educated.

The first “The Rock”

> It chops and changes with no explanation.

The site provides the relevant information. In the "Story of the Basilica" the first section is "The Life of St. Peter" and it tells you why Simon came to be called Peter.

https://virtual.basilicasanpietro.va/en/st-peter-history

The name changes before mentioning that he is renamed by Jesus. But yes, it does explain later on. I’d skipped to Wikipedia by then.

Then there is that Saul guy

There is the Old Testament King Saul.

And there is Saul of Tarsus (unrelated) who first persecuted Christians and then converted and became the apostle Paul who was later beheaded by the Romans during Nero’s reign.

I visited St. Peter's Basilica a few years ago. I highly recommend it.

I had to exit the experience because my laptop (admittedly a few years old) could only give me 1-2 frames per second. I love the idea, but in the current state, viewing hi-res pictures would give you a better experience than this virtual 3d tour, IMO.

Unplayable on my computer. I think the textures take too long to load. Most of the times I'm looking at jerky wireframes.

The navigation in 3D-space is annoying. I do my fair share of Three.js development, was very experienced in Maya, but I just can't use this one here. Panning is on the screen's plane at unbelievable slow increments, that I can't help but thinking that someone made this for VR and only tested it there, I can't imagine that a mouse was used during testing.

I mean, you could play Quake II in a browser, what, 15 years ago? Interfaces like this are inexcusable today.

I am deeply disappointed as one of the few sites that has a Latin translation, www.vatican.va does not respect my "Accept-Language: la" request header, but instead provides a language selector UI element that brings you to a special Latin section.

Interesting to read that a number of people struggle to view this using their laptops while it works decently for me on an iPhone. It makes sense and that comparison is meaningless, especially when not given any specific specs, but still, I find this fact fascinating.

The frame rate is not great on a modern iPhone which is a bit of a bummer. Maybe missing some optimizations or something.

I liked the VR tour, my wife did not. I once got to spend most of a day at the Vatican while I was on a business trip, and the tour brought back memories and let me see many areas that I didn’t get to see.

At first I didn't like the wire frame scene introductions, but I got used to it.

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