Sistine Chapel

Very nice. In fact, almost nicer than being there (though you should do that anyway if you get the chance). Because now you can experience the details for as long as you want without a hundred other people around you who are just as annoyed at you as you are at them.<p>I get it that a tourist complaining about tourist attractions being too crowded is total hypocrisy on my part. But at the same time what I wouldn&#x27;t give to be able to stand in that chapel for as long as I wanted just to look, all by myself. And now I can. We live in amazing times.<p>Be sure to look &#x27;up&#x27; and use the zoom feature.<p>The only improvement I can think of is a &#x27;link&#x27; icon that you can use to cut-and-paste a certain viewpoint + zoom so that you can show others specific details, and two more viewpoints at the end and the beginning (so you don&#x27;t lose the corners due to distortion).

Meta comment about the panorama interface:<p>The click+drag view control feels inverted to me. I&#x27;m curious whether I&#x27;m in the minority, though. For FPS games on PC I use normal mouse, but for console FPS games I use inverted joystick.

Saint Peters VR-Tour:<p><a href="http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/san_pietro/vr_tour/Media/VR/St_Peter_Altar/index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vatican.va&#x2F;various&#x2F;basiliche&#x2F;san_pietro&#x2F;vr_tour&#x2F;M...</a><p>more Saint Peter VR-Tours: <a href="http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/san_pietro/vr_tour/index-en.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vatican.va&#x2F;various&#x2F;basiliche&#x2F;san_pietro&#x2F;vr_tour&#x2F;i...</a><p>more Vatican VR-Tours: <a href="http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/index_en.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vatican.va&#x2F;various&#x2F;basiliche&#x2F;index_en.html</a><p><pre><code> Special thanks to Villanova University in Pennsylvania (USA) for its contribution to the realization of the Virtual Reality Tour of the Sistine Chapel </code></pre> -- <a href="http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/index_sistina_en.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vatican.va&#x2F;various&#x2F;cappelle&#x2F;index_sistina_en.htm</a><p>The Sistine Chapel HTML file contains some commented text:<p><pre><code> Photography: Chad Fahs &amp; Paul Wilson, Villanova Department of Communication Stitching &amp; Image Correction: Chad Fahs &amp; Paul Wilson iOS conversion of the entire site is done courtesy of the Villanova Center of Excellence in Enterprise Technology and the Villanova Computer Science Department contact: Frank.Klassner@villanova.edu </code></pre> Please add &quot;(2010)&quot; to the headline (see copyright on the chapel floor)

For more renaissance goodness check out this site on the Ghent Altarpiece - zooms so far in that you can see between the paint cracks:<p><a href="http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/#home/sub=altarpiece" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be&#x2F;#home&#x2F;sub=altarpiece</a>

For the soundtrack: <a href="http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/music/Sistine.mp3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vatican.va&#x2F;various&#x2F;cappelle&#x2F;sistina_vr&#x2F;music&#x2F;Sist...</a><p>(from the source: Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli - 5. BenedictusTP1(Simon Preston: Westminster Abbey ChoirTCM&quot;Giovanni Pierluigi Da PalestrinaTAL6Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli - Allegri: Miserere)

When I was in the Sistine Chapel a couple of years ago, someone opened that big black door at the back of the hall (between the two wooden walls).<p>This was not the tourist exit, and inside there were huge beautiful golden hallways with exquisite paintings all around.<p>Does anyone know if this part of the chapel is visible or recorded anywhere?

This is one of those cases where (having not used one) I sincerely hope the Oculus Rift can bring something more to the experience compared to what we have now.<p>What you can&#x27;t get from your computer screen is the <i>scale</i> of it all. You can intellectually get it by looking around at reference points in the image, but you can&#x27;t feel it the way you can when you are there.<p>This would be especially true if one had a similar view of St. Peter&#x27;s. There&#x27;s almost no way to convey the sheer enormity of it without actually physically being there. That&#x27;s one of the things I remember the most from my visit: that feeling of being so tiny inside this massive, ornate indoor space that is so big, there&#x27;s a haze when you look from end to end.

I saw a thing on TV once where some religious historian lady was pointing out how the robe enclosing god as he reaches out to adam resembles the human brain in cross section. She speculated that Michelangelo may have been leaving a clue as to what he really thought of his employers, based on his attendance at banned human dissections around that time.<p>(It was a serious programme about art history BTW, not some conspiracy nonsense. Wish I could remember the name.)

Excerpt from &quot;When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel&quot; by Michelangelo:<p><pre><code> My painting is dead. Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor. I am not in the right place—I am not a painter </code></pre> <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/2010/01/labor_pains.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;arts&#x2F;poem&#x2F;2010&#x2F;01&#x2F;labor_pains....</a>

Having never had the opportunity to actually see this in person, yet seeing god knows how many prints, its fascinating to see the whole room in perspective and just how monumental of an artistic achievement this was. Lots of components I&#x27;d never seen that had me starting for minutes. Only thing I wish was that there was a way to zoom.

Very cool. This got me thinking: there are many tourist sites where people aren&#x27;t allowed to go anymore because of safety&#x2F;security issues. It would be awesome if the site coordinators (or whoever makes executive decisions on such things) would make pages like this one available on their websites for their respective tourist attractions. And in more POVs.

Having never visited, I did not realize until how high the density of nudity per square meter was.

Anyone have the technical info on how this was done and put together? Looking at other pages, it appears this was created by Villanova University in Pennsylvania (<a href="http://www1.villanova.edu/main.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www1.villanova.edu&#x2F;main.html</a>) for the Vatican, and they appear to have several folks actively publishing in photogrammetry journals. It looks like it was done with some very high quality photogrammetry (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogrammetry" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Photogrammetry</a>), and I&#x27;d be interested to see what program they used, and if its available, as my agency could probably find some uses for it.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to Disney World. It was a long time ago, childhood amnesia and so on, so forgive the fuzzy details here... But basically, they had a very early version of virtual reality (a headset a la Oculus Rift). They chose the same imagery, so I was immersed in the Sistine Chapel. I remember being deeply impressed at the time (although I was a kid, so who knows how great it actually was). Regardless, I have never been to Italy and have wanted to go ever since that experience.

You know what would be cool? If I can click on those painting and read story underlying each of them. I can read that all day long.

The moneyshot: <a href="http://imgur.com/aiBLxXD" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;aiBLxXD</a><p>Absolutely breathtaking!

Really awesome stuff. I wonder why they chose this level of maximum resolution -- from the Gigapixel images it&#x27;s clear that they could support zooming into the individual paint cracks, although with the publicity that this is getting, that might have incurred extreme bandwidth costs.

This is an extreme violation of the Chapel&#x27;s no photography rule. I hope they catch whoever did this.

Am I the only one finding it ironic that they used (Adobe) Flash to show the chapel to the whole world, when tourists can&#x27;t use (camera) flash to show it to their close friends?<p>Well, just jacquesm, I simpathize with the stewards: &quot;please, no flash&quot; :(

From an American copyright point of view... Is this copyrightable? It is a reproduction of a work of art that is no longer under copyright. The image itself offers no creativity, other than as a reproduction.

other 360° views: <a href="http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/index_en.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vatican.va&#x2F;various&#x2F;basiliche&#x2F;index_en.html</a>

This is amazing. The paintings make a lot more sense seeing them in context.<p>Also, who knew, the Vatican knows how to hire good software engineers. I guess they did hire Michelangelo too though.

it may be nitpicking, yet - the projection seems strange at the borders of the viewport. And there are a lot of 3d TVs&#x2F;monitors out there - could have done a 3d version :)

Needs WASD to move, and a more &quot;standard&quot; mouselook.

Funny - I just got back from Rome 2 days ago and was in the Vatican - imagine the surprise when I saw this on top of of Hacker News.<p>The experience of being in the sistine chapel is nice but a bit spoiled by the fact that there are hundreds of tourists in the chapel as well and Italian guards are pushing you to move and be in the center (Often yelling at tourist who aren&#x27;t moving fast enough and throwing out of the chapel anyone trying to take a picture).

I&#x27;ve been looking for Waldo for hours now. No luck.

I was luck enough to score an after hours (nightime) guided tour of the Basilica (including this chapel) several years ago. We nearly had the entire place to ourselves and saw rooms that were kept off the general tour. We saw stone that is now extinct and art that melted my face. We lingered so long the guards chased us out. There are no words for how beautiful this place is.

For a room where you spent the whole time looking up... that gimbal lock is really annoying.<p>Quaternions, please?

Now if they could only add in bing-like hyperlinks to every depictable image in there so I could actually know what I&#x27;m looking at!<p>Very, very beautiful site though and wonderfully fresh idea coming from such an arcane institution. I like it a lot.

Hah, got me thinking maybe PG&#x27;s pre-Viaweb startup idea to put art galleries on the Web was just too far ahead of its time[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;bronze.html</a>

The performance of this is crazy good. I clicked from mobile and the scrolling was very fast and smooth, which is strange because the desktop version is flash I think :O

I would hope that museums across the world along with locations like this would have this technology applied. I would not mind small fees to use on private collections.

Cool! Although it kind of stutters a little bit as I move around (very very minimally but just enough to break the flow). MBPR 2012, Chrome.

Too bad, what ever it is I&#x27;m not gonna be able to se it. ERROR: &quot;Adobe Flash Player 9&#x2F;10 or higher needed&quot;

What role do you think the `Sistine-Chapel.xml` file, included in the html source&#x27;s `embedpano` script, plays?

This game has good graphics, but I&#x27;m not really into the art style. They should get a new texture artist.

on a thread dominated by insightful comments on religion history and art I hate to do this but ... I can&#x27;t get pinch to zoom to get in close on the iPhone - is the image only &quot;as seen from ground level&quot; or can you really get up close if using a PC?

Just wait until they add VR support!

Has the actual Chapel aged so well or have the images been reworked to give show more color?

I know that Paul Debevec worked in the Sistine Chapel. Is this his work?

I&#x27;d have preferred WebGL over Flash.

I love the internet and this is why!

Wow - though music a bit too much.

Can&#x27;t admire.<p>I am flash impaired.

Super cool!

I went from Seventy Two to Sisty Four (sic) karma points all because of this stupid chapel. Get over your religious nostalgia and get back to real tech news... Thanks.

There&#x27;s nothing technically novel about this. It&#x27;s also kind of offensive given the mass genocide committed in the name of religion. Hacker News turning to Christian News.

old stuff

I like how God has these really buff arms... He must bench-press at least 225lb.

that&#x27;s gay!

Looks like flash is still good for something.

Sixteen chapel? What about the other fifteen?;)

If you look straight down &quot;Copyright Musei Vaticani&quot;. Is that really on the floor at the Sistine Chapel or just for this web version?

Just remember: whatever piece of code you&#x27;re working on right now; whatever tiny feature on a tiny website you&#x27;re trying to implement; that is your Sistine Chapel.