Virtual Angkor is a giant 3D representation of Angkor, the capital city of the Khmer empire, in 1300 C.E. The website contains snippets of 360° videos from various locations in the city as well as images and historical descriptions of geography, commerce, architecture, and culture. The goals of the decade-long project are to create a historically accurate and informative world that teachers can use as a teaching aid, and to spur on the creation of educational models formats like this one.
This project combines historical knowledge with highly detailed 3D modeling, making a product that closely emulates a reality from 700 years ago. What does that take?
Sources
The making of Angkor Virtual required expertise from multiple fields including history, archeology, 3D modeling, and web development. The work most likely began with in the hands of historians and archeologists. Knowledge and data from Angkor in the years surrounding 1300 C.E. forms the basis of this project. They may have asked questions like: What did daily life look like? Was the climate similar to today’s climate in Angkor? How did Angkor get its resources? What kind of clothes did people wear? By compiling as many answers as possible to questions like these, the researchers could begin to form an idea of what the city might have looked like.
Processes
From there, that pile of data and knowledge had to be organized, then processed into a collection of 3D models and descriptions. 3D modeling experts worked in tandem with the historical researchers to make accurate representations of the past world. From the website, it’s unclear whether the final product comes in the form of one giant 3D world or many smaller representations of the world. Regardless of how the world is rendered, the final product is presented to show every unique aspect of the world.
Presentation
To present this giant world in an accessible and digestible manner, the researchers took advantage of Youtube’s 360° video functionality, making their 3D world easily available on any computer or phone. Descriptions of culture, commerce, and other aspects of the city that couldn’t be captured visually were laid out in simple terms to accompany the 360° videos.
Breaking down this project inspired my curiosity in 3D modeling and the scale behind this project. Modeling an entire city must have taken a serious amount of time from some skilled 3D artists. This makes me wonder if models like Virtual Angkor are worth the educational benefit that they produce given the current state of modeling technology and the expertise required to model something well. Then again, this project is fun to explore and immortalizes a world that won’t exist again, so maybe the effort that it took will be worth the educational benefit in the long term.
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Woah this is a really cool project. I think that you answered your own question perfectly. This is somewhere that will never exist again, but by creating a virtual version of it, we can bring it back to life. Despite how much work went into it, I believe it was definitely worth it to have this priceless culmination of history into something viewers can engage with so easily. I think you should have done a featured photo on this post since just a title does not do it justice.