Virtual Angkor Wat

This sounds fun. Via Matt Hall.

Virtual Angkor takes users back about 1,000 years into a thriving community of 25,000 virtual Cambodians living inside a model of Angkor Wat, partially mapped using geometry generated by airborne laser surveys.

Another Australian project, Virtual Songlines, takes us ten times further back into the past to look at how different tribes of the first Australians lived in places like Warrane and Meanjin (better known today as Sydney Cove and Brisbane's CBD).

Some of the detail in Dr Chandler's world has been crafted through extraordinary archaeological diligence. For instance, in order to accurately recreate flora, Dr Chandler's team had to first consult with experts on soil cores to verify which plants existed at that time, then flew over and photographed the trees before modelling and texturing the relatively geometrically complex objects.

For audio, he has travelled to remote villages to record ambient sound, a task that has become harder and harder as Cambodia develops and motorbikes, cell phones, and televisions become commonplace. Highly detailed terrain maps have been gleaned from two helicopter borne laser surveys, known as LiDAR, that were conducted by a partnership including the University of Sydney called the Khmer Angkor Lidar Consortium at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

Unlike a film or book though, both Virtual Songlines and Virtual Angkor are not being built as a final product but rather just one version of worlds that will continually evolve to reflect competing historical perspectives and new archaeological discoveries in what Dr Chandler has dubbed an "iterative dialogue".

Virtual Songlines will be on display as a virtual reality experience at Brisbane Powerhouse in June, Sydney's Powerhouse Museum at the end of July and available in numerous libraries as a desktop computer experience around the same time, with a downloadable PC version expected in August.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-22/virtual-angkor-wat-and-other-3d-ancient-civilisations/8447504?pfm=ms&pfmredir=sm