This looks amazing but I'd appreciate an autoplay button or free walk + look, the scrollwheel monorail handcranking makes the exploration rather frustrating.
Agreed. The content is great but UX is terrible so I quit early. Scrolling is not a good way to initiate action and is extremely annoying to deal with.
Arrow keys work for me. But it's still strange because when you keep it pressed often nothing happens for a time and then abruptly you move too quickly.
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?
They put an add-noise filter on top. It's often used to give it a more 'filmic' look and also hides away some uniformity in simple textures. Plain, plan surfaces look very fake, add some noise and suddenly it feels more 'real'.
Plus someone probably decided it would look cool...
There are around 20 persons credited at the end, so that should give a rough estimate. It is quite well done.
Animation and graphics is quite expensive to develop, since iterations in the development loop can take quite some time (think: do a few changes, render everything, start up the animation, check if it looks right, repeat).
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.
> games like Tomb Raider or Uncharted give little details some movement
Remember that those games have budgets of tens of millions of dollars and are built by literally hundreds artists and programmers. Animation is very time consuming (and hence expensive) so it’s no wonder to me that the creators of this project opted for a static scene, this way they could deliver something cool more quickly instead of dragging this project for months and risking cancelling it due to lack of funds to finish it.
I’m very well aware of this. But I’m also aware that we have game engines like Unity, Unreal or the Cry engine which have webGL options and such and various tools etc to make the process cheaper. I didn’t check the credits if it contained a reference to the tools used.
It wasn’t a critique to the creators of the project or that I think it isn’t good. It is really great especially since it runs in the browser and looks as good as it does but again just too static for me. I would wish if it contained a little bit more ambient elements.
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...
If a tenth of the money spend in games were spend in make such a projects...
I visited maybe around a decade ago, and was truly saddened by the state of it. It was all in ruin, maybe 1 guard watching the whole area, anyone could come, take a piece and leave, and many unfortunately do. The best pieces of Persepolis are sadly kept outside the country, in places such as the Louvre [0]. Iran itself does such a poor job at taking care of it's truly breathtaking historical and touristic sites. A few years ago I also got the chance to visit Tepe Sialk [1], which had settlements dating back 6000 BC. Again, barely a single person around. Striked a conversation with the old man at the gift shop, and it turns out he was one of the archeologists that had spent decades exploring the site alongside famous French archeologists. Many of the pieces again ending up at the Louvre.
Persepolis wasn’t in great condition when I went but it also wasn’t a shambles. There’s a gift shop, guards, and a reconstruction of part of the palace, and a lot of tourists. Also a small set of offices for archaeologists. I’m a professional historian so I was a little bummed by the lack of adequate public-facing educational markers and texts, but it certainly can’t be compared to something like the Buddhas of Bamiyan as an excuse for removing items to European museums.
It was in stable condition until it was set on fire by a westerner and until part of the remains were stolen by other westerners. Plus the country would be a democracy today without western 1953 coup.
Xerxes shouldn't have burned Athens. His father, Darius, in fact had advised him to follow the protocol set by himself and Cyrus.
Dr. Mossadeqh was not running a "democracy". Post WWII Iran's political space was far more complex than the caricature presented since the fall of the Shah, and sans British instigated support for counter-coup to remove Mossadegh with help from USA, a quite significant chunk of Iranian military and society, including the Clergy (who were already using terror in Iran, btw), agreed with the American analysis that Mossadegh would merely precede a Soviet controlled Tudeh takeover of Iran.
This is why I ignore performance reports from Apple users. Unless it's something I can replicate on 100% of my test devices, it's not worth the time trying to figure out what weird configuration a some small percentage of a small percentage of users has.
I've actually never heard that criticism. There's like a total of 8 Apple configurations and most of the time, Apple users tend to be on the latest versions of iOS and macOS. I love getting Apple bug reports specifically because they're usually super easy to reproduce. The "weird configurations" type stuff is in my experience some random sloppy Android device sold for $50 and massacred by its OEM.
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.
Good point ! I'm on firefox on linux, and after 1 min of loading the thing it barely could run on my machine, so I didn't explore every possibility. If you can look around I guess it could be replaced by a 360° video but those are really heavy, probably more than the 3D experience itself.
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
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.
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.
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.
I couldn't agree more. I'm currently playing AC Odyssey and it's as close as you can get to being there. Lots of artistic license but they definitely did their research.
There won’t be much left of our civilisation. I was told recently that concrete is acidic and attacks the metal netting in reinforced concrete over the long time. None of our structures will still be up 500 years from now.
That's not quite correct. Concrete is basic and prevents/slows the rusting of metal reinforcement, but not forever and it's made less effective with rising CO2 levels.
Now imagine for a moment if we painted our modern marble statues and architecture as they did. The ruins mentality is a big part of neoclassicism, to the point where the designer of the Bank of England building made a sketch of how the building would look in a thousand years' time:
Speaking of painting sculptures, I wonder why they never try to re-paint Greek and Roman sculptures. I've read some articles that show what the statues would have looked like back in the day and paint makes them look spectacular.
When you visit Persepolis, you can rent a VR headset and see certain parts of the site reconstructed in VR. It's really impressive and drives home the scale of what was built.
It's cool indeed. But I find it sad that such a tremendous piece of architecture is not listed on the world's 7 ancient wonders while the Temple of Artemis and other Greek structures are on the list. No surprises there, given that the list was created by the Greek historian Herodotus.
Pretty sure the canonical list of Wonders isn't due to Herodotus, as several of the items on it were built after his death.
(apparently Herodotus also had a list of wonders, but it didn't survive. Given his interest in Persia though, I suspect it would've had several Persian monuments on it)
Not exactly what you're looking for but if you're just into aesthetic look up Talos Principle. By itself a fantastic game, but they have a VR version as well that is incredible to walk through.
I am convinced that one day you visit an old ancient site. You put on the AR/VR headset and the real-life ruins change into fresh newly constructed buildings with NPCs from that time. The headset/lenses have a pair of 32k displays with a vof wider than your eyes. Graphics are rendered with 100 trillion rays per frame at 240fps. About 10.000 times faster than current hardware.
That's why any colors that have been preserved looks so great. Whether it's the temple of Medinet Habu in Egypt or the tombs of the builders, it blows your mind when you realize all those decorations in the temples were not only carved, but painted too.
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.
I keep thinking something must be "wrong" with my scrollwheel, as all those experiences are super annoying but keep getting published by some people. I think it's not as bad if you're on a Mac or something. Anyway, I agree, it's just bad ux
Presenting an interactive experience and then taking away all control from the user and replacing it with an extremely frustrating navigation mode (hint, not everyone is using a phone/tablet or laptop touchpad - try to scroll that much with a mouse!) is just stupid and completely wasting the potential of the medium.
Good lord. Have you ever made anything that explored "the potential of the medium" as much as this? What makes you feel equipped to call its creators "stupid"?
The UI could have been better, but it worked and it was something I’d never seen before and it made my day. Rich web experiences like this are difficult to pull off at all. I’m glad they made it. People who write empty, sneering comments about other people’s hard work shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near computers.
My Android phone was fairly mid range when I bought it, and that was a few years ago (long enough that I don't remember now!) and it works fine for me.
Edit: I should mention that I only tried Chrome
Edit 2: Also tried Firefox on my Android device. It was noticeably slower but still worked.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadTried it on a PC. It's close to useless, unfortunately.
Too bad, these other efforts elsewhere to create 3D models of ancient cities work fine both on a PC and Android tablets.
There’s a set of accessibility options; maybe they could add some alternative navigation methods.
Perhaps it just doesn't stack the renders - if it did, changing view would decrease the image quality back to low samples, maybe that's the reason...
Plus someone probably decided it would look cool...
Animation and graphics is quite expensive to develop, since iterations in the development loop can take quite some time (think: do a few changes, render everything, start up the animation, check if it looks right, repeat).
Remember that those games have budgets of tens of millions of dollars and are built by literally hundreds artists and programmers. Animation is very time consuming (and hence expensive) so it’s no wonder to me that the creators of this project opted for a static scene, this way they could deliver something cool more quickly instead of dragging this project for months and risking cancelling it due to lack of funds to finish it.
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...
If a tenth of the money spend in games were spend in make such a projects...
https://inculture.microsoft.com/arts/ancient-olympia-common-...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/persian-collections-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tepe_Sialk
Leave them there, take care of them there. Stop thinking everything from poor nations is up for grabs.
Which clearly isn’t happening, so IMO it makes sense to store them in a stable society with enforced property rights.
Doesn’t have to be UK or France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan
Dr. Mossadeqh was not running a "democracy". Post WWII Iran's political space was far more complex than the caricature presented since the fall of the Shah, and sans British instigated support for counter-coup to remove Mossadegh with help from USA, a quite significant chunk of Iranian military and society, including the Clergy (who were already using terror in Iran, btw), agreed with the American analysis that Mossadegh would merely precede a Soviet controlled Tudeh takeover of Iran.
If you're going to make it look like a first-person perspective game, it needs to act that way.
and I very much like the sound effects.
When you're between scenes with descriptions you can pan around by dragging the mouse. I'm hoping they extend this to allow free walking around.
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.
Jimmy Carr joked about that in QI once, how movies and series set in ancient Rome and Greece also tend to do this.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58rbknKBJvc
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/Ae...
The nearby Naqsh-e Rostam (tombs of Darius and Xerxes among other things) was also stunning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqsh-e_Rostam
(apparently Herodotus also had a list of wonders, but it didn't survive. Given his interest in Persia though, I suspect it would've had several Persian monuments on it)
Designers, who think that this is a good idea to waste people's time like this, shouldn't be allowed anywhere near computers.
Presenting an interactive experience and then taking away all control from the user and replacing it with an extremely frustrating navigation mode (hint, not everyone is using a phone/tablet or laptop touchpad - try to scroll that much with a mouse!) is just stupid and completely wasting the potential of the medium.
Yes. Does that matter? This particular work has terrible, user-hostile navigation controls, and needs to support free movement.
We could play Quake 2 in the browser several years ago, so it's not an unreasonable thing to ask for.
Excellent work in general!
Edit: I should mention that I only tried Chrome
Edit 2: Also tried Firefox on my Android device. It was noticeably slower but still worked.