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Show HN: The Tomb of Ramesses I in the Valley of the Kings (mused.org)

118 points by lukehollis ↗ HN
Hey all, I’m coding up a new tour system for my 3d Egyptian work. After the last feedback, I focused on building more interactive content and fx into the guided tours with sound and telling the mythology in the wall art.

I’d love feedback with the new version – this is built with vanilla Three.js and footage captured on my iPhone 12. For various fx, I coded many of my own shaders based on work by https://twitter.com/akella and others on ShaderToy, so I’m keen to test on more devices.

As the hacker, so the (ancient) painter.

43 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] thread
dang
The earlier thread: Show HN: I 3D scanned the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33357197 - Oct 2022 (280 comments)

--

meta note - thanks to the reader who emailed us to nominate this submission for the second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and https://news.ycombinator.com/pool) - it was a good one!

All are welcome to send such suggestions. Our favorite suggestions are the ones with no personal connection to the post, other than that you just ran across it and found it interesting.

keerthiko
glad you bring up the second-chance pool concept occasionally, as i missed the original announcement and previous references, and it's an incredibly useful thing to know about HN as someone who shares/writes posts regularly but rarely.

the hand-curated second-chance pool is a tasteful way to mute the ephemerality and timing-dependence of a platform like HN a tiny bit.

TheHappyOddish
I have it set up in my RSS reader and highly recommend it. Lots of dupes with the frontpage, but excellent stuff that would often be missed.
karaterobot
Neat, but a small annoyance:

Since you're setting the "mused_cookies_accepted" cookie without me accepting anything, there isn't much point in showing that banner. It's not GDPR compliant anyway, so you'd do just as well removing it and improving the UX.

lukehollis
Hm, interesting--which browser/device are you using?

I just double-checked, and I don't think the cookie is set before being accepted. But I could've done something wrong. When I test on my browsers on my mac, I'm not getting the cookie set before I click accept.

junon
That's not how the GDPR laws work. You're allowed to set cookies that are functional for the site without prompting. You must only prompt for optional cookies. Knowing if the user has allowed cookies, itself stored as a cookie, is a functional cookie.
prawn
Crashes for me on iPhone a few steps in. iPhone 14/Safari.
lukehollis
Thanks for letting me know--I took the dust out and changed the render pipeline a bit, and I hope this can help. It runs on my iPhone a little better now, but it didn't crash before.
intellix
Crashed on my iPhone 12 a few steps in. I tried again without turning the background and it did it again.
devoutsalsa
I recently had an opportunity to visit Egypt, just around Cairo, for a few days. I have to say it was absolutely worth it for me, especially since I love ancient cultures and historical sites. My absolute favorite experience was crawling through the bent pyramid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid), and this website is reminding me of that experience.

Enjoy this site, and maybe consider a trip to Egypt, especially when it's not flooded with tourists during the high season.

ipython
Agree- the bent pyramid is amazing. It is a long walk in some cramped conditions so make sure you are able to walk while crouched and not afraid of confined spaces.

The guards outside the pyramid happily handed their ak47 to my son to pose for photos. Like most places in Egypt you will want to carry petty Egyptian currency for small “tips”.

lukehollis
That's so cool! I'll try to head there when I get back in October.
devoutsalsa
You’ll naturally want to see the Red Pyramid, too. Also worth it. Going to Saqqara for the step pyramid and the Pyramid of Unas (for the underground portion with the hieroglyphs) was also great. I thought Memphis was underwhelming after the other things, but it’s still cool.
lukehollis
What a country.. it's incredible, right? I have some work from Saqqara that's publicly available on our Explore page, but there's so much 3d content to get through. And I'll add the Red Pyramid too, thanks!
dboreham
Perhaps worth mentioning that high season is winter, when it's not very hot.
devoutsalsa
I went in June. Got nice & sweaty. It wasn’t too busy at that time. The only place that felt crowded was the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but I’m still glad I went.
Demiurge
Can this be made to work in Oculus VR?
lukehollis
Working on it!
snailmailman
I tried your Giza Pyramid in VR but sadly Matterports “vr” isn’t great as it is only 2d photo spheres. (Unless they’ve changed it? I hope they have)

You lose all sense of scale, because it’s not 3d at all. And any head movement will make you motion sick because it’s a single photosphere.

Please whatever you do, make it better than photo spheres if possible. Matterport is very popular for virtual tours but in vr it’s disappointing. This would be incredible to experience in 3d

simonw
Whoa, this was captured on an iPhone? What kind of process did you use to turn that into 3D models?
lukehollis
Yeah, all of this was just iPhone -- I did capture with Matterport's app. Some of the final results didn't have great lighting, etc, and a laser scanner would have much better quality. I wondered how this type of capture would look compared to the other cameras that I usually work with--for creating educational materials more than scientific recording because it's so much faster.

The iPhone Lidar results are messier, and the 360 images took a bit of time to edit both as eqs and cubemaps to brighten certain areas, fix bad stitching in the 360 images, remove people, etc.

Since the last project, I'd been working on a new system with threejs to make the tours more gamelike, so I brought the 360 images and 3d data into the new system, cut out the highlight overlays from the 360 images, added the netherworld environment art, and coded up shaders to do various effects in the storytelling.

epolanski
Neat work, great job.

It's super interesting to see content like this. I feel like if you can nail a bit more the exploration on mobile and make performance slightly better this is gold.

ipython
We visited Luxor as a family last year and the Valley of the Kings is absolutely a must visit. The fact that these hieroglyphics are preserved so well over thousands of years is astounding. It feels as if the walls were painted last week.

If you do visit I highly recommend the use of a reputable tour guide. As a foreigner you have a target painted on your forehead 24/7 and having a guide to drive you and walk with you is worth every penny.

I never felt physically unsafe while in Egypt but for example my 8 year old boy was shaken down for $$ for toilet paper in the bathroom. That’s how shameless the grift is.

dboreham
Going next February which reminds me I need to book a guide. Also recommend guides even for first world high traffic destinations like Rome/Vatican: guides have ways to bypass queues that save considerable time, and know the best time of day to hit each site.
doix
> We visited Luxor as a family last year and the Valley of the Kings is absolutely a must visit. The fact that these hieroglyphics are preserved so well over thousands of years is astounding. It feels as if the walls were painted last week.

Depending on the tomb, it might've been restored. Not sure if you saw Nefertari's tomb in the valley of queens, but it absolutely blew my mind. Having done very little research before going, I was shocked that the colors could have remained so bright after so many years. Then a spent a few minutes on wikipedia and found out that a lot of restoration work was done, starting in the 80-90's.

> I never felt physically unsafe while in Egypt but for example my 8 year old boy was shaken down for $$ for toilet paper in the bathroom. That’s how shameless the grift is.

The grift is crazy, but the toilet paper thing is actually pretty normal. I guess I don't know how much you got charged, but paying 5 Egyptian pounds(0.10-0.15 USD) for toilet paper was considered "normal". At least that's what some non-grifty locals told me at a bar when I was complaining to them.

You're definitely right about having a target on you 24/7 though. I'll probably never go back to Egypt because of it, I found it absolutely exhausting after a month of traveling there. It took me a few months to get back to my usual self and not immediately dismiss anyone that ever tried to talk to me.

freilanzer
> I never felt physically unsafe while in Egypt

That surprises me. I probably couldn't visit countries like Egypt or Mexico, no matter how much they'd interest me.

_a_a_a_
Trying to extract cash from rich foreigners is what happens in poor countries (source: experience). I don't know the relative poverty level in that country though, but people who don't have a bank account/paid job/any resources, well it's understandable to me. Not nice for visitors but very understandable.
justsomehnguy
Oh, my.

Story mode is good, but some minor things:

flashlight slows the things down quite massively, previous version wasn't fast but this one lags;

it's a bit too dark, I wouldn't mind "turn on the lights" switch;

you can escape to the outbounds in the free look mode (eg at "Khepri accepts the offering..."), though this isn't a problem per se (and an opportunity to show where those Plutonians buried their shi

qingcharles
What are you running on? I'm on a 12-year-old mid-range desktop PC with no offboard GPU and it ran just great...
jh00ker
+1 to "turn on the lights" mode
lukehollis
Okay added a light button at the top -- thanks!
freilanzer
That dismisses the guided tour though, right?
lukehollis
Thanks for the feedback. I took the dust out and reworked the render pipeline a bit -- and fixed some other things so you can't escape the same way in the Netherworld scenes.
ckz
I love this! My father created a panorama with walkable waypoints like this for the Golden Temple in Amritsar and a few other historic sites back in the Shockwave/Flash days (something like 2001). Turned out to be some of my early learnings in building with Flash.

I also actually took my own series of photos on a whim a few weeks ago with the intention of DIY stitching my own pano and used to love using Microsoft's "old" (08-10) Seadragon/Photosynth tech.

I'd be very curious to learn more about your JS implementation. :)

lukehollis
That's so cool--and it's interesting to see how the 360 image tours have evolved over the years. I'm hoping gaussian splatting or nerfs will do better soon. You could try your photos in nerfstudio and see what type of results you're able to get: https://github.com/nerfstudio-project

Threejs has been great to work with. It's pretty simple orbitcontrols but the occluders on the dollhouse for the cursor in first-person view are a little more complex. I hope to share the codebase, but it's definitely still a sketch instead of the full picture--right now with a lot of adhoc parts for this specific tour for the vfx.

doix
This is absolutely amazing! Highlighting the hieroglyphs and explaining what they mean is amazing. Having been to the tombs, it was a bit annoying not knowing what anything meant. Lots of picture taking and then looking stuff up later + asking our guide. For those unaware, guides aren't allowed into the tombs in the Valley of the Kings/Queens.

I couldn't help but think that some AR glasses that could overlay some explanations in the tombs would be absolutely amazing. This is a close second, I'm not sure if it's my brain filling in some gaps, but I really feel like I'm there again.

lukehollis
Thanks so much for mentioning this--I always wanted this too while I work at these sites! This tour took so many hours staring at Netherworld snakes reading the Book of the Gates, but there's so much more that could be added about the wall paintings.

The Time snake in the depths in the Netherworld still mystifies me.. and the Barque of the Earth! Wonders. OsirisNet has good interpretations for going deeper: https://osirisnet.net/tombes/pharaons/ramses1/e_ramses1_01.h...

And the Darnell's Netherworld Books book is awesome: https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Egyptian-Netherworld-Books-Wr...

Or for audio, Dominic Perry's amazing podcast with the 2 part narration of the Book of Gates: https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/175-in-the-hall-of-th...

AR in these tombs would be amazing!

spondylosaurus
Why aren't guides allowed into the tombs? Sounds like there might be an interesting story behind the rule...
doix
I believe the official reason is to be respectful to the dead, but I suspect there is a lot practicality to it as well. The tombs aren't that big, there isn't really room for crowds to stand around a guide while they explain stuff. By not having guides, people go in-out quicker and it's easier to move around in there.

If you do the free explore thing on OP's site, you might get a sense of the size. Imagine 10's of 30 people groups crowded inside those tombs, it would be a nightmare.

lukehollis
Thanks so much for the feedback! I added godrays and stars to the Netherworld scenes, turned off the dust, and made other improvements for rendering. I ended up switching from three's default renderer to the postprocessing package.

I also added a light bulb button to the top too to toggle the lights and guided mode.

krylon
I love it. FWIW, works great on Firefox 117.0.1 running on Linux/amd64
smusamashah
I remember your last post. Please consider processing your images through Nerf or instead the recent Guassian Splatting which is very popular these days because of processing requirements and ease of training and use. People have made web viewers for guassian splatting.