[HN Gopher] Show HN: I 3D scanned the tunnels inside the Maya Py...
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Show HN: I 3D scanned the tunnels inside the Maya Pyramid Temples
at Copan
With these 3d captures, you can explore the 4km tunnel system that
archaeologists created inside the temples at Copan that are closed
to the public. The tunnels are often flooded by hurricanes and
damaged by other natural forces--and collapsed on me and my
Matterport scanner more than once--so this is a permanent record of
how they appeared in 2022-23. Unlike Egyptian pyramids, the Maya
built their temples layer by layer outward, so to understand them,
researchers tunneled into the structures to understand the earlier
phases of construction. I arranged the guided versions of the
virtual tours in a rough chronology, moving from the highest to the
lowest and oldest areas: the hieroglyphic stairway composing the
largest Maya inscription anywhere, the Rosalila temple that was
buried fully intact, and finally the tomb of the Founder of the
city, Yax K'uk' Mo'. I've been working to build on top of the
Matterport SDK with Three.js--and then reusing the data in Unreal
for a desktop experience or rendering for film (coming soon to
PBS). Blog about process: https://blog.mused.com/what-lies-
beneath-digitally-recording... Major thanks to the Matterport team
for providing support with data alignment and merging tunnels while
I was living in the village near site.
Author : lukehollis
Score : 180 points
Date : 2024-10-15 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mused.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mused.com)
| mmh0000 wrote:
| I don't know which is cooler. The 3D scan itself or the 3D map in
| the browser.
|
| This is amazing. Thank you for sharing.
| lukehollis wrote:
| Thanks for visiting! It was so many tunnels.. I feel bad that I
| don't build faster sometimes, but this took awhile.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Luke I'm so happy to see you here on HN. What you and the Mused
| team are doing is incredible.
| lukehollis wrote:
| Wow, thanks so much! I don't recognize your un, who is this?
| But thanks again!
| 23B1 wrote:
| I'm a nobody, but I've stumbled across your site before.
| Kudos and be sure to let the HN community know how we can
| help.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Very well done! I was pleasantly surprised how well this works on
| a phone.
|
| Did you take any scans after sections collapsed? Would love to
| hear more about what happened.
| lukehollis wrote:
| Matterport's SDK is so good -- I'm so impressed with the
| details like mobile performance the more time I spend building
| with it.
|
| I did take some scans after the collapse! After we'd dug
| ourselves out and crawled out on our bellies, I went back with
| Polycam. The collapsed section we dug through was comparatively
| small, maybe 4-5 meters: Section 1: https://poly.cam/capture/4B
| B863F2-1CC3-46E3-8BDB-232EE3057BD...? (you can see where we
| crawled out to the intersection here -- the whole intersection
| had ceiling collapse, but only the section we dug out through
| was fully covered). Section 2:
| https://poly.cam/capture/3C5BB7BD-5FC9-4C00-AE1C-84E0544C51C...
|
| We're just lucky it wasn't a rocky ceiling that fell, that
| would've been much worse.
|
| The team taking care of the tunnels is doing an amazing job
| with the resources they have, and they're continually
| backfilling tunnels now and maintaining the ones that are
| there. It took us about an hour to dig out.
|
| You can compare to the intersection in the matterport version
| in the same vicinity:
| https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=r5BR6K6Qxix&ss=338&sr=-.21...
|
| I don't want to editorialize too much, but at that moment we
| were totally brothers--I was still early with Spanish, and the
| language, country, age differences fell away, and we dug
| ourselves out.
| downboots wrote:
| The transitions are much smoother than Google street view
| lukehollis wrote:
| Matterport works special magic on the transition between 360
| images in their SDK. As far as I understand it, they render 360
| cube camera onto the material of the mesh of the environment as
| you move so it looks like you're moving in the real mesh but
| only seeing the 360 image. I tried to approximate this myself
| in Three.js but didn't get anywhere near the quality or
| performance of their work. Homage.
| nh2 wrote:
| If you like smooth transitions, check my startup's:
|
| https://benaco.com/go/k4-green-hn-2024
| lukehollis wrote:
| These look great! What strategy did you use to do the
| transitions?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| That is so cool.
|
| Is it hard to avoid integrator error in long tunnels?
| lukehollis wrote:
| It is so hard! The long tunnel sections were the worst, but
| thankfully most of them had multiple join points, like in the
| Temple 16 / Rosalila temple excavations.
| oidar wrote:
| I love all these Maya inscriptions. I hope more are discovered
| (and hopefully some manuscripts) - the little we do have of Maya
| text is amazing. What are your top 3 things to tell people at
| parties that no little about Maya?
| lukehollis wrote:
| I love the inscriptions too--the stela only get more meaningful
| the more you learn about them. But it's kind of like Egypt, the
| iconography is harder to understand because we inherited from a
| different culture.
|
| For me, the Maya have always been important because they're our
| history and our stories in the Americas (I'm from the US) --
| more than the greco-roman mythology I grew up with. They grew
| corn and love ball games. Their stories are more directly our
| stories, and their struggles are our struggles.
|
| Not to be political, but they also kind of wiped themselves out
| by large scale environmental collapse, and the jungle is filled
| with their undiscovered monuments. There's still so much to
| learn.
|
| People really geek out on how much the Maya knew about
| astronomy too -- they shot archaeoastronomy docs twice while I
| was working on site. Richard Feynman even helped decipher Maya
| glyphs and writes about it in "Surely you're joking Mr
| Feynman". He gave a lecture also if the audio file can be
| checked out somehow:
| https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/acce...
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| This reminds me of a recent Lex Fridman podcast with an expert in
| ancient American civilizations:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzzE7GOvYz8
| voodooEntity wrote:
| The fact that people carved this tunnels with simple tools and
| their bare hands into the underground is so freaking amazing i
| cant find better words for it
|
| Edit: also very nice tool :)!
| TheCleric wrote:
| This is great! Great job!
| lukehollis wrote:
| Thanks!
| everly wrote:
| Definitely one of the better implementations I've seen using
| Matterport's SDK, nice work.
|
| Did you use the Pro3 as the capture device? Before the collapse
| anyway!
| lukehollis wrote:
| Thanks, and I was still on Pro 2 + BLK 360 unfortunately. Haha,
| thankfully all the cameras survived and made it home, just
| muddier.
| everly wrote:
| Oh man, the BLK360 can be a frustrating (albeit incredible)
| device even in the best of conditions, let alone this. Glad
| to hear everything survived!
|
| I mostly use the Pro3 now but did a big chunk of this Georgia
| Tech scan with the BLK:
| https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=PB8FgAyyjHx
| lukehollis wrote:
| Haha, yeah I know what you mean. I had to do the exterior
| with the BLK for only a few hours each morning before it
| overheated.
|
| That's an impressive huge capture!
| rendall wrote:
| Amazing. So inspiring!
| farhaven wrote:
| This is very cool!
|
| Can you share the technical background you've used for creating
| the 3D reconstruction? Like software packages, or algorithms
| used.
|
| Are we looking at the result of packages like OpenSfM here, or
| COLMAP?
| lukehollis wrote:
| Onsite I used the Matterport capture app and Matterport Pro 2
| and BLK 360. For the web version linked here, I built on top of
| the Matterport SDK with Three.js
| https://matterport.github.io/showcase-sdk/sdkbundle_home.htm...
|
| So in the virtual tour, you're seeing 360 imagery from the
| cameras and a lower resolution version of the 3d capture data,
| optimized for web. The lower res mesh from the scanner is
| transparent in first-person view mode so users get cursor
| effects on top of the 360 image.
|
| For film, PBS sent out a documentary crew, and they wanted me
| to render some footage of the full tunnel system, so I exported
| the e57 pointcloud data from Matterport and rendered the clips
| they needed in Unreal. It should be coming out soon with "In
| the Americas."
| renewiltord wrote:
| Does anyone know if there's a simple solution to generating NeRFs
| from a continuous all directional camera (like a GoPro Max). It
| would be fun to make an explorable universe like that.
| lukehollis wrote:
| You should be able to do this with nerfstudio:
| https://github.com/nerfstudio-project/nerfstudio/ I've done it
| a few times, you can test 3d Gaussian Splatting also instead.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Thank you! That's terrific.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Hadn't seen this comment before. Why is this one not Guassian
| Splats or nerfs?
| jofla_net wrote:
| This is great use of the technology. There should be scans of all
| our national monuments, world wonders, etc. So much better a use
| for the tech than just Redfin.
| volk45 wrote:
| Popping my comment cherry here!
|
| I'm a 3D artist that is currently encountering staunch
| resistance of generating 3D models from drone captured
| photogrammetry of historically protected sites in Pennsylvania,
| USA.
|
| I've had resistance from the state and county level in pursuing
| take off and landing permission at historical sites.
| Communicating my intentions of digital historic preservation
| with photogrammetry has been a difficult "sell".
|
| I'm a licensed commercial remote pilot - however I need
| property owner permission to take off and land. Many sites are
| in state/county owned property in my area.
| smusamashah wrote:
| This is great. I think you shared 3d scan of some other pyramid
| sometime ago here on HN. I think you should try processing this
| data through a Guassian Splatting software. I have no idea how
| many images Guassian Splats require to work well or the CPU/GPU
| requirements but I have seen very very cool Guassian Splatting
| demos on twitter where you can absolutely freely fly around the
| scene and view it from any angle.
| programd wrote:
| I'm glad to hear you're working on getting an Unreal environment
| for these scans. I find the movement in the web version to be
| incredibly clunky. This really needs to have a game like
| environment to do it justice.
|
| In general we clearly have the technology to capture 4K-8K
| environments and turn them into very realistic virtual worlds. Is
| anybody even doing such work? For example capturing a
| neighborhood in San Francisco (or any city) as it looks in 2024
| for historical reference? Seems like that should be a thing.
|
| I've seen high quality environmental scans, even way back in the
| Silicon Graphics days when they showed an amazing scan of the
| Sistine Chapel. But it seems to me all such scans wind up in some
| proprietary player format which was designed by somebody who
| never played a decent open world game like Fallout 4, Cyberpunk,
| Battlefield, Red Dead Redemption. I have yet to see a museum
| environmental scan which gets anywhere near the immersive quality
| of those games. This is not so much a criticism of such work -
| it's awsome! - but maybe more of a call to arms for game people
| to help out the scholars.
| namibj wrote:
| I was working towards that aiming at the medieval city of
| Rothenburg o.d.T. in Germany.
|
| Unfortunately it's a lot of code writing to support rolling
| shutter cameras strapped to multicopters, where you capture
| video with short enough exposure to prevent blur. The 3D
| recovery has to respect the fact that the rows of the image are
| taken from different positions and angles, causing this up
| infiltrate basically the entire pipeline.
|
| And global shutter cameras are barely accessible.
|
| If there's some group with the man power and funding to
| actually pull this off, please get in touch, I would like to
| pick back up!
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(page generated 2024-10-15 23:00 UTC)