This is really cool. Seeing these beautiful colors I realize how much how I imagine the ancient world is shaped by museum artifacts and photos in textbooks, which show raw and brown/grey/white stones, rusty tools and weapons. I've grown thinking about pre-medieval times as a landscape of ruins. It would be like if future humans were picturing our current world as nothing but bombed cities.<p>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.
Not directly related, but I can still recommend "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" as a very enjoyable recreation of key places and buildings around ancient Greece. Ubisoft spent a considerable effort to research and recreate some highlights, and being able to freely walk around help a lot with immersion.
Extremely well done (at least for desktop). Many seem to dislike that it's scroll-controlled, but tbh I would've given up immediately if it were free navigation—I didn't feel like wandering around looking for things, just wanted to observe the sights. And since the core structure is a sequential list of sights, the scroll interface is a nice way of keeping that linear structure in place while automatically choosing nice camera positions along the transitions.<p>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.
Very nice model, but sadly it's Getty, so it's not available to download. That would be a good way to get the story and images out. Make it free to download, and people would turn it into Quake maps, and eventually people would learn more about Persepolis.
It worked great on my iPhone 13 Pro Max. But it is quite warm now. The scrolling worked well without any hiccups. I didn’t test it on my PC yet. The only thing I would wish is a little bit more life in the scenes. I love how games like Tomb Raider or Uncharted give little details some movement. I think the overall presentation is awesome just too clean for my taste.
This is wonderful.<p>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...<p>If a tenth of the money spend in games were spend in make such a projects...
Very well made to navigate the site, just missing a birds-eye perspective or mini-map to show the current location of the camera (and angle?) within the city.<p>and I very much like the sound effects.
Why's it slightly noisy? It never resolves to clean when the camera's still, so it doesn't seem to be MC noise for something like ambient occlusion or raytracing/pathtracing, so I assume it's just a 2D effect on top of the image for look?
This is beautiful.<p>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?<p>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.
This is cool, but since all positional movement is on-rails, I find myself questioning their decision to use real-time rendering, as opposed to a pre-rendered video that users can scroll through. The latter approach would have allowed Getty to use higher quality models and lighting, and made the experience smoother on low-end devices, possibly at the cost of bandwidth.<p>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.
I find it amazing and really interesting, but i have a "side" question: does anybody know how much does it cost to realize such a great work?
Extremely cool. I love this use of technology.<p>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".
I played Assassin Creed Origin (ACO) few years ago, the 1st AC game I felt really immersed in. I played the AC1 back in the early 2000s but it didn't click for me. ACO is different: totally open world. You could climb anywhere, even to the top of the pyramid of Giza during its glorious time with the golden top. You can climb to the light-house on top of the library of Alexandria. The sceneries are majestic. I feel like I travel back in time and live in the era.<p>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.<p>I couldn't wait to experience all this again in a truly HD VR world. Maybe some day!
In Our Time has an episode on Persepolis [0]. Great episode of a great podcast.<p>0 - <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075</a>
This is an amazing presentation
I wish instead of constant scrolling you could move forward by just holding your click/tap on a forward button on the screen. Sounded like a better UI
Brilliant to walk through. I'd love to see the ruins of it in real life.<p>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.<p>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!
Does anyone know what technology is used underneath? It is obviously compiled to webgl, but what are they using for development? Unity? Some other engine?
Not sure what everyone else is having issues with, I've watched this on both my ubuntu boot as well as windows and it's fantastic. I just have an old logitech mouse, nothing fancy, and it's brilliant.
Whoever designed the navigation in this must have some sort of continuous-scroll device. My scroll-wheel finger would develop RSI by the time I finished exploring that using a normal scroll-wheel mouse...
I like it but I wonder why the model looks so flat and more like painting over than sculpting. Did they not use bump map or the 3D model was so coarse it would not help much anyway? The view of the real artifact is way more impressive even without the painting.
I think a video content would also be amazing or a virtual reality. A video game experience even in web would be nice too. I find that the scroll experience was hard to use. But the idea is pretty amazing
I am a bit disappointed that it's always those grand palaces. I also want to see the environment in which average people lived, this is harder for me to imagine than those grand temples.
You can look around with click and drag but you can't move. There was some art that I wanted to look at from close but I couldn't.
at least an ability to zoom would have been good.
It's astounding to me that something so beautiful like this was ever real with or without modern technology. It's incredible what you can do with enough man-hours.
Oh my. I just recently went down the Persepolis / Alexander the Great rabbit hole. This is the side of the internet that makes it the marvel that it is.
When I see historical artefacts like these from Persia, I always wonder about the loss of creativity with modern approach of minimalism and optimisation to cost. Our buildings are boxes, houses white and have minimal squarey furniture, and almost everything in society feels like an exercise in optimisation towards cost and resource efficiency.<p>Where are our modern equivalent of marvels like Persians from ~500 B.C !
This looks amazing but I'd appreciate an autoplay button or free walk + look, the scrollwheel monorail handcranking makes the exploration rather frustrating.
Eternal forced scrolling "powerpoint" HTML slide-show? No, thank you. I have stopped after 3 pages. What is the point of doing this?<p>Designers, who think that this is a good idea to waste people's time like this, shouldn't be allowed anywhere near computers.
Funny how they went through that much effort to render everything client side, but then restrict the whole thing to a (quite frustrating) one dimensional control with the scroll wheel. In the end, a pre-rendered video would have worked much better for this UX. Many WebGL "experiences" I see fall into this trap, they want full control of what's shown, wasting their technical effort.