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Show HN: The Tomb of Nefertari [QV 66] Guided Virtual Tour

83 points by lukehollis 2y ago

I 3d scanned the Tomb of Nefertari and am building this guided virtual tour, trying to bring in photogrammetry of artifacts that I've made at various museums. It crashes sometimes still on mobile devices. I wasn't able to take photogrammetry photos of the artifacts from the tomb in the Museo Egizio in Turin because they were traveling while I was there (and now the museum is closed to install a new roof anyhow), so I tried to include comparanda from other museums where I had scanned artifacts. I tested the same dataset with 3d Gaussian Splatting but that had lower resolution results for great complexity in frontend code and reduced performance on older devices. [3DGS tour: https://mused.com/en/tours/860/learn-about-3d-gaussian-splatting https://mused.com/en/tours/860/learn-about-3d-gaussian-splat...] Moving forward, if anyone's working on the same idea, I didn't find a good path to monetization through web-based 3d content, so I'll take the high resolution photogrammetry of spaces into Unreal and switch to desktop and headset builds.

oregoncurtis 2y ago
Really cool. The main thing I wish is that the transitions between "slides" was slower and not just a quick crossfade. The current transition is a bit disorienting mean I have to look around again to see where I am relative to where I was. Looking forward to seeing something like this on a VR headset.
- lukehollis 2y ago
  Thanks, good to know -- that's something I can change
empire_and_sun 2y ago
I think this will be highly requested by regional museums, they might sign you contracts.
arctic_relegate 2y ago
thoroughly enjoyed this, never realized Nefertari's tomb was so well preserved.
deliveryboyman 2y ago
Not working for me on mobile. I get stuck in a loading loop
- thih9 2y ago
  Same, getting stuck on 81% on three attempts (ios). But Free Explore worked fine, I enjoyed it a lot; I especially liked the ceiling.
vixen99 2y ago
Might there be some warning if a machine can't cope? It crashed mine.
doix 2y ago
This is absolutely amazing! Did you get permission to do this or did you have to tip the guards there? I wish I saw something like this before going in. For those that don't know, guides aren't allowed into the tombs. So you kinda just wander around, don't understand anything (if you're me) and take some photos to try and ask the guide later what they mean. Depending on your guide, all their answers might be bullshit and you'll end up googling later. Edit: Just spent far too long clicking through all the tours available on your site, absolutely amazing. Really feels like I'm back in Egypt.
- lukehollis 2y ago
  That always bugged me too! And just in general I wanted to understand more of what the wall paintings in the tourist path in the Valley of the Kings and Queens were. Having "scenes from religion" or this or that book is way too vague. It's a lot of research reading Netherworld texts and finding their corresponding scene on the tomb walls to write these tours.
soci 2y ago
Amazing, thanks for helping anyone in the world explore Nefertari's tomb. The rest of the site is also amazing! For Nefertari's, did you just use a camera and tripod to scanned the tomb you have a sort of 3d map of the tomb ? If so, what equipment did you use? In case it helps the author, it crashes in Safari et when at some point (random) during the visit (v. 17.2.1 on a M1 Pro MBPro). Works perfect on Brave
- lukehollis 2y ago
  Thanks for letting me know, I'll work on performance and memory optimizations. I was developing on Brave. I used an iPhone 15 and Insta360 one rs with the Leica lenses -- without tripod. I actually went through and edited the humans (including myself) out of every shot, but you can see where I missed some. I'm hoping to go back through and fix them. I put up other tours on the website just from 360 video, and they're much less edited, so I'm still hiding at the bottom of most of the shots until I can edit myself out.
spondylosaurus 2y ago
Potentially silly question: how do you get these 3D scans without capturing yourself in the scan?
- lukehollis 2y ago
  It's challenging work! Especially in the tunnels at other sites.. But for this scan specifically, I didn't use a tripod, and I edited myself out at the bottom of every 360 photo. For terrestrial lidar, you can avoid the laser and cameras by following a circular path opposite the device sensors or hide behind a rock or tunnel corner, etc.
ninav11 2y ago
This is so interesting, congrats on launching it. Hard to describe this feature request, but would be cool to see a map of the tomb and where you "are" in it as you navigate through.
criddell 2y ago
It would be cool if I could double tap some hieroglyphics and get a translation.
- lukehollis 2y ago
  That's a great idea! I'm working on this in the pyramid of unas with an Egyptologist. Sometimes that granularity of information is still hard to track down.
lukehollis 2y ago
As a follow-up, I used the Polycam app and an iPhone 15 without tripod to capture the majority of imagery in the tour. You can see the iPhone Lidar capture as dollhouse matched with insta360 photos for the virtual tour. The museum photogrammetry was also completed with Polycam. I aligned the 360 images with Metashape, exported the cameras.xml file with camera transforms/rotations, and converted these to my own json format with a simple 360 virtual tour viewer that I created w/Three.js. For navigating between tour points, to try to approximate a similar motion affect as Matterport and Google Streetview, I somewhat unsuccessfully project the output of a cubecamera as a rendertexture on the dollhouse lidar of the tomb. I'm not happy with its current state but had to keep moving forward, and I appreciate much more the engineering that went into Matterport's Showcase frontend especially.
alsetmusic 2y ago
I'd love to see something like this appear in Apple Vision Pro. You could sell me a dedicated app that lets me inspect every inch of the tomb in 3D for a reasonable fee. In fact, how about an app that lets me buy experiences like this as In-App Purchases? There are lots of sites that could be "sold" as an experience and I think there's a decent market for doing so. You only have to capture each one once. Depending on the level of detail, I suppose I'd pay $20 or so to be able to immerse myself in such environments. Maybe more, but it'd have to be excellent, not half-assed.
- lukehollis 2y ago
  Sounds great! I'll build this starting with 12 monuments that I've scanned in Egypt.
tmilard 2y ago
Nice. But transition between 360-Photos is important in this Area. I have also developped a personnal solution to do "Immersive visits". The visual quality is not as good as your exemple(Nefertity) but I feel immersion is very good. - My website :https://free-visit.net https://free-visit.net - Example of an immersive visit : https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01 https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01 I would love to have your feedback. Thierry

83 points by lukehollis 2y ago

oregoncurtis 2y ago

Really cool. The main thing I wish is that the transitions between "slides" was slower and not just a quick crossfade. The current transition is a bit disorienting mean I have to look around again to see where I am relative to where I was. Looking forward to seeing something like this on a VR headset.

lukehollis 2y ago
Thanks, good to know -- that's something I can change

empire_and_sun 2y ago

I think this will be highly requested by regional museums, they might sign you contracts.

arctic_relegate 2y ago

thoroughly enjoyed this, never realized Nefertari's tomb was so well preserved.

deliveryboyman 2y ago

Not working for me on mobile. I get stuck in a loading loop

thih9 2y ago
Same, getting stuck on 81% on three attempts (ios). But Free Explore worked fine, I enjoyed it a lot; I especially liked the ceiling.

vixen99 2y ago

Might there be some warning if a machine can't cope? It crashed mine.

doix 2y ago

This is absolutely amazing! Did you get permission to do this or did you have to tip the guards there? I wish I saw something like this before going in. For those that don't know, guides aren't allowed into the tombs. So you kinda just wander around, don't understand anything (if you're me) and take some photos to try and ask the guide later what they mean. Depending on your guide, all their answers might be bullshit and you'll end up googling later. Edit: Just spent far too long clicking through all the tours available on your site, absolutely amazing. Really feels like I'm back in Egypt.

lukehollis 2y ago
That always bugged me too! And just in general I wanted to understand more of what the wall paintings in the tourist path in the Valley of the Kings and Queens were. Having "scenes from religion" or this or that book is way too vague. It's a lot of research reading Netherworld texts and finding their corresponding scene on the tomb walls to write these tours.

soci 2y ago

Amazing, thanks for helping anyone in the world explore Nefertari's tomb. The rest of the site is also amazing! For Nefertari's, did you just use a camera and tripod to scanned the tomb you have a sort of 3d map of the tomb ? If so, what equipment did you use? In case it helps the author, it crashes in Safari et when at some point (random) during the visit (v. 17.2.1 on a M1 Pro MBPro). Works perfect on Brave

lukehollis 2y ago
Thanks for letting me know, I'll work on performance and memory optimizations. I was developing on Brave. I used an iPhone 15 and Insta360 one rs with the Leica lenses -- without tripod. I actually went through and edited the humans (including myself) out of every shot, but you can see where I missed some. I'm hoping to go back through and fix them. I put up other tours on the website just from 360 video, and they're much less edited, so I'm still hiding at the bottom of most of the shots until I can edit myself out.

spondylosaurus 2y ago

Potentially silly question: how do you get these 3D scans without capturing yourself in the scan?

lukehollis 2y ago
It's challenging work! Especially in the tunnels at other sites.. But for this scan specifically, I didn't use a tripod, and I edited myself out at the bottom of every 360 photo. For terrestrial lidar, you can avoid the laser and cameras by following a circular path opposite the device sensors or hide behind a rock or tunnel corner, etc.

ninav11 2y ago

This is so interesting, congrats on launching it. Hard to describe this feature request, but would be cool to see a map of the tomb and where you "are" in it as you navigate through.

criddell 2y ago

It would be cool if I could double tap some hieroglyphics and get a translation.

lukehollis 2y ago
That's a great idea! I'm working on this in the pyramid of unas with an Egyptologist. Sometimes that granularity of information is still hard to track down.

lukehollis 2y ago

As a follow-up, I used the Polycam app and an iPhone 15 without tripod to capture the majority of imagery in the tour. You can see the iPhone Lidar capture as dollhouse matched with insta360 photos for the virtual tour. The museum photogrammetry was also completed with Polycam. I aligned the 360 images with Metashape, exported the cameras.xml file with camera transforms/rotations, and converted these to my own json format with a simple 360 virtual tour viewer that I created w/Three.js. For navigating between tour points, to try to approximate a similar motion affect as Matterport and Google Streetview, I somewhat unsuccessfully project the output of a cubecamera as a rendertexture on the dollhouse lidar of the tomb. I'm not happy with its current state but had to keep moving forward, and I appreciate much more the engineering that went into Matterport's Showcase frontend especially.

alsetmusic 2y ago

I'd love to see something like this appear in Apple Vision Pro. You could sell me a dedicated app that lets me inspect every inch of the tomb in 3D for a reasonable fee. In fact, how about an app that lets me buy experiences like this as In-App Purchases? There are lots of sites that could be "sold" as an experience and I think there's a decent market for doing so. You only have to capture each one once. Depending on the level of detail, I suppose I'd pay $20 or so to be able to immerse myself in such environments. Maybe more, but it'd have to be excellent, not half-assed.

lukehollis 2y ago
Sounds great! I'll build this starting with 12 monuments that I've scanned in Egypt.

tmilard 2y ago

Nice. But transition between 360-Photos is important in this Area. I have also developped a personnal solution to do "Immersive visits". The visual quality is not as good as your exemple(Nefertity) but I feel immersion is very good. - My website :https://free-visit.net https://free-visit.net - Example of an immersive visit : https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01 https://free-visit.net/fr/demo01 I would love to have your feedback. Thierry