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Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

persepolis.getty.edu

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Re: Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

#141

Post by uuyi »

tomc1985 wrote: post #137
gigglesupstairs wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website is designed for desktop with pretty good UX tbh even if it looks like breaking common patterns. It’s a very small learning curve considering it achieves the immersion it intends to.

I don't know how spinning the scroll wheel until my finger hurts is "immersive", but ok

Pity us poor fools trying to use a touchpad on this. My fingers nearly caught fire.

Re: Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

#142

Post by benbreen »

gunfighthacksaw wrote: post #120
satao wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. Classic example of imperialistic people... Leave them there, take care of them there. Stop thinking everything from poor nations is up for grabs.

> take care of them there 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.

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.

Re: Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

#145

Post by bobdupneu »

bin_bash wrote: post #128
xyzzy4 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well isn’t it better to safeguard things in the British Museum than let them get lost forever?

Yep. Better stolen than destroyed if you ask me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

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.

Re: Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

#146

Post by elliekelly »

millerm wrote: post #104
nomercy400 wrote: post #81

This reminds me of Encarta. Encyclopedia on a cd-rom, with audio, video and images on many subjects, all clickable.

Encarta was awesome. It felt like it had a wealth of information on a cd-rom. It was quite magical in the early 90s. I miss those days. All of it.

It was one of my favorite "computer games" as a kid. I used to keep an alphabetical list of the other things I wanted to look up so that I could minimizing having to switch between the all of the discs (3? 4? 5?) it came on.

Re: Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

#147

Post by behnamoh »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #37

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.…

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.

Re: Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

#148

Post by Wowfunhappy »

This is cool, but since all positional movement is on-rails, I find myself questioning their decision to use real-time rendering, as opposed to a pre-rendered video that users can scroll through. The latter approach would have allowed Getty to use higher quality models and lighting, and made the experience smoother on low-end devices, possibly at the cost of bandwidth.

A conventional video would mean loosing the ability to drag to look around, but I'm not convinced that this was a significant part of the experience—IIRC, they don't even tell you that it's possible. Alternately, Getty could have sent a 360° video, at the cost of even more bandwidth.

Re: Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

#150

Post by Wowfunhappy »

cma wrote: post #143

The scrollwheel trend needs to go away. It isn't smooth at all with a wheel on desktop.

It was quite smooth for me, on a Hackintosh desktop with a gaming mouse.

IMO, in highly experiential websites like this, there's something very tactile about scrolling to move.

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