Show HN: I 3D scanned the tunnels inside the Maya Pyramid Temples at Copan
mused.com315 points by lukehollis 19 hours ago
315 points by lukehollis 19 hours ago
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 Kʼukʼ Moʼ.
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.
Superb! I expect whoever coated the remains with that red cinnabar stuff died rather early, probably with tooth and hair loss and severe mental issues. Perhaps this fate was expected but given that "mad hatters" were a thing until fairly recently, people can be a bit strange when it comes to dealing with poisons. The guide notes point out that only the most sacred rituals involved this red mercurial stuff. I'm not surprised. It might be rare but rarer still will be people willing to deploy it unless that fate is considered a good way to go. That tour is a remarkable use of the technology. It's something we have to be careful of while working on site! We're really careful around the rooms that have mercury in them--there are few that I didn't put in the guide also. I was wondering about this too: they've found high levels of mercury in the water supply at Maya cities and believe now it contributed to the eventual collapse: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/mercury-and-algal-bl... > “The drinking and cooking water for the Tikal rulers and their elite entourage almost certainly came from the Palace and Temple Reservoirs,” wrote Lentz and his colleagues. “As a result, the leading families of Tikal likely were fed foods laced with mercury at every meal.” This makes me think: what if today's rulers are being poisoned by something making them act like idiots? > This makes me think: what if today's rulers are being poisoned by something making them act like idiots? Leaded gasoline! With how old politicians are in the US, they are almost certainly affected. Claiming that today’s rulers are acting like idiots seems off topic. And subjective too; even if only because yesterday’s rulers weren’t different. It could be that there is something making our leaders mentally ill, or it could be that only the mentally ill think that they should be leaders. 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. 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. Have you looked to see whether there is a local archaeology or social history society in your area that you could join? They will have individuals involved who are already used to dealing with property owners to arrange research projects, and you might be able to accompany them on the trips they organize. For reference, the archaeological society in my region serves around 400 square miles and typically organizes a low two-digit number of digs every year. There are also some other societies in the same region who focus on preserving and documenting recent history where excavation isn't required. Another idea: if you don't already have any formal education in history, you could study for some qualifications in the subject. It would probably do much to reassure landowners that you are not going to harm the sites in any way (although I struggle to think of a way you could do so with a UAV!) In any case, good luck; I'd love to see the models! I’ll have to look into regional historical societies. The county wide historical group has not been keen on allowing access to properties without a justified end goal other then “3D model”. Which to be fair is a step I’ve still yet to figure out other then having models hosted on sketchfab. I’m starting to visit in person farmer markets that exist on land with over 80+ year old histories and structures. The personal educational avenue is another great option I haven’t considered. I’ll keep this in mind. Here is a 3D model of a carriage house built in the late 1800s that I processed from drone photography. https://skfb.ly/oW8v7 This was from a public park so no permission was needed. I used to live in Pennsylvania across the street from a colonial era house and just a few miles from a national historic site. I love your idea of digital historic preservation but totally understand the skepticism and reluctance of those entrusted with protecting the sites. Is there a way you could partner with the custodians of a historic site so they become part of the digital preservation effort? Maybe offer a way to embed the 3D model on an official webpage of the historic site? Getting the custodians onboard could smooth the process of getting the required permissions. > digital historic preservation When I hear "digital" I don't exactly associate long-term preservation with it. Do you also have a strategy for the "digital preservation" part? Websites don't live long. Storage media don't last long either. Should such a program be made together with a partner that has a strategy for long-term (outlook of centuries) storage of digital content? Because otherwise I don't see the "preservation" aspect. The monuments will likely survive all the digitized data created from them, easily. It's not just the data, but also ways to use it. Imagine this was done twenty years ago and it was all saved as Adobe Flash media. I think preserving the digital media plus ensure that it will still be usable (hardware and digital format) is a monumental effort, in comparison creating the digital representation is not the hard part. This is great feedback. I’m still at the content creation stage, aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry to produce 3D models. Hosted on sketchfab. I really haven’t figured out a solution to host 3D models that isn’t tied to a web based private company. I.E sketchfab. Curios if there could be an avenue of resin 3D prints of the 3D models. I always seem to loop back to “why does someone want/need this?” Which may in turn be the reason for state/county property owners refusing permission to access property. The digital capture is indeed the easy part at the scale I’m working in - thanks again for this insight Hey I'm really sorry! It's really hard. My photo permissions at Giza took two years to secure. My only advice is to keep showing up in person and hang in there--I feel for you! That’s some incredible perseverance from you! In person is the right move though. Getting FaceTime in with groups or people who are part of the process does seem to make the best headway. > staunch resistance Why? PA restricts drone take/off and landing to only 6 parks in the whole state. So for example, Washington’s crossing state park with its 3.7thousand acres, restricts drone/take off and landing by state law. I’ve politely reached out to the park, and being a federally licensed commercial pilot with insurance coverage doesn’t pry that jar open. The airspace classification is the limit, so I can fly over as much as I want - problem is all surrounding property is privately owned and I need to maintain 3 statue miles of visual line of site. ^ All of the above makes it impossible to capture up close aerial imagery of colonial period houses and barns for photogrammetry. Smaller single structure county owned properties only hand out photography permits if events are being held, or the photography/videography is associated with a production company. I may need to expand my municipal and county outreach further away from the county I reside in. Which is a shame since there are some beautiful historically preserved farmlands and structures in my home county. 100%! Eventually, one way or another, I think they'll be scanned every year to study the environmental effects of tourism and compare over time. This reminds me of a recent Lex Fridman podcast with an expert in ancient American civilizations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzzE7GOvYz8 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? 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." 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. Thanks for visiting! It was so many tunnels.. I feel bad that I don't build faster sometimes, but this took awhile. 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. 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! You can download or test the Unreal version pixel streaming here: https://mused.com/netherworld-ancient-egyptian-afterlife-sim... Or here's the trailer for the project in Unreal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlNgpG9X7mc I have a lot of work keeping up with games, it's true--games are expensive to build and aiming at photorealism art style continually looks dated quickly while stylized graphics, less so. I'm trying to fundraise to build this game currently, but it's a tough sell. Educational games don't do well on Steam, so right now, I'm just distributing through my website as I build. The small income this provides helps me contribute back to the modern Egyptian Egyptologists that are excavating and documenting their own culture though. The latest Game Science title, Black Myth Wukong, does an awesome job with 3d captures of Chinese monuments and bringing the mythology and history to life. Were the tombs and other structures originally sealed in with no path to the outside world? Were there other rooms accessible for rituals without archaeologists having to excavate tunnels in the modern day? For the majority of the monuments that I worked on, they were ritually destroyed, buried, and built on top of -- with the Rosalila temple being the main exception. The tombs typically have some type of arch and the temple area and staircases are kind of built around or on top of them. Wow! That sure brings back memories. I've been there twice, 2011 & 2012.
Congratulations. I'm very impressed. 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. Hey, yeah that was me. I spent quite a bit of time last year using pre-existing scanner positions to train nerfs/splats and didn't get anything that was usable, unfortunately. I ended up shifting to Unreal for a higher graphics tier, so if you want to see the Great Pyramid of Giza interior in the highest quality level, you can here: https://mused.com/netherworld-ancient-egyptian-afterlife-sim... For Unreal I used a few methods but mostly conventional photogrammetry incorporating the lidar. Ultimately, I'm hoping that downloading the file or some type of pixel streaming for web until the nerfs or splats -- or whatever follows them -- works out. 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 :)! > The fact that people carved this tunnels with simple tools and their bare hands I'm confused, mate: why and how would 21st-century professional archaeologists avoid using modern powered tools and techniques? That's absurd, dangerous, and not cost-effective. 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! Thanks, and I was still on Pro 2 + BLK 360 unfortunately. Haha, thankfully all the cameras survived and made it home, just muddier. 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 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! That is so cool. Is it hard to avoid integrator error in long tunnels? 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. Very cool. Any other Maya sites in the pipeline to do? Yes, I 3d captured the murals at San Bartolo, and they're somewhere in the pipeline of being ready to be made public soon. 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? 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... Is there any plans to support a WebXR interface in the future? Yes, these scans also work in WebXR using Matterport's default VR viewer -- I have a basic page setup at https://mused.com/vr/ -- but I'll get the Copan tours added there. 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. 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/4BB863F2-1CC3-46E3-8BDB-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. The transitions are much smoother than Google street view If you like smooth transitions, check my startup's: These look great! What strategy did you use to do the transitions? It works as you described: Texturing the mesh "live" as you move through it. It does use Three.js as a base, but needs custom shaders to make it 60 FPS. 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. Luke I'm so happy to see you here on HN. What you and the Mused team are doing is incredible. Wow, thanks so much! I don't recognize your un, who is this? But thanks again! 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. 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. 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. Hadn't seen this comment before. Why is this one not Guassian Splats or nerfs?
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