Comment by programd
13 hours ago
I'm glad to hear you're working on getting an Unreal environment for these scans. I find the movement in the web version to be incredibly clunky. This really needs to have a game like environment to do it justice.
In general we clearly have the technology to capture 4K-8K environments and turn them into very realistic virtual worlds. Is anybody even doing such work? For example capturing a neighborhood in San Francisco (or any city) as it looks in 2024 for historical reference? Seems like that should be a thing.
I've seen high quality environmental scans, even way back in the Silicon Graphics days when they showed an amazing scan of the Sistine Chapel. But it seems to me all such scans wind up in some proprietary player format which was designed by somebody who never played a decent open world game like Fallout 4, Cyberpunk, Battlefield, Red Dead Redemption. I have yet to see a museum environmental scan which gets anywhere near the immersive quality of those games. This is not so much a criticism of such work - it's awsome! - but maybe more of a call to arms for game people to help out the scholars.
I was working towards that aiming at the medieval city of Rothenburg o.d.T. in Germany.
Unfortunately it's a lot of code writing to support rolling shutter cameras strapped to multicopters, where you capture video with short enough exposure to prevent blur. The 3D recovery has to respect the fact that the rows of the image are taken from different positions and angles, causing this up infiltrate basically the entire pipeline.
And global shutter cameras are barely accessible.
If there's some group with the man power and funding to actually pull this off, please get in touch, I would like to pick back up!
You can download or test the Unreal version pixel streaming here: https://mused.com/netherworld-ancient-egyptian-afterlife-sim...
Or here's the trailer for the project in Unreal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlNgpG9X7mc
I have a lot of work keeping up with games, it's true--games are expensive to build and aiming at photorealism art style continually looks dated quickly while stylized graphics, less so. I'm trying to fundraise to build this game currently, but it's a tough sell. Educational games don't do well on Steam, so right now, I'm just distributing through my website as I build. The small income this provides helps me contribute back to the modern Egyptian Egyptologists that are excavating and documenting their own culture though.
The latest Game Science title, Black Myth Wukong, does an awesome job with 3d captures of Chinese monuments and bringing the mythology and history to life.