In the dense jungle canopies of Central America and the Yucatan, much of what remains of the Maya civilization remains hidden from view. As a consequence, many sites that are not popular tourist destinations, yet instrumental in understanding Maya culture, are seen by very few people. Items found during excavation are typically claimed for preservation in museums. Large exhibits such as temple structures, by virtue of being buildings, cannot be demonstrated to a wider audience. Our goal is to change how archaeological finds are shared by exploring digital methods for documentation and visualization. This project seeks to create immersive visualizations of the many 3D models that we have collected over the years at a Maya Archaeological site in Guatemala. We want to provide an educational and narrative experience to engage the audience into exploring an active archaeological site, while understanding key elements of the ancient Maya civilization and culture.
This project is a collaboration between Engineers for Exploration (E4E) and the Triton XR organization. The Maya archaeology project in E4E focuses on collecting 3D data from the tunnelling excavations of various ancient Maya structures. We use different types of technologies, such as LiDAR, photogrammetry, and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping). All of these techniques produce 3D models in the form of point clouds or meshes. This VR project uses these models to recreate the excavations to allow users to explore them at will, without the constraints of accessing the real site deep in the jungle.
Much of the 3D data that we collect are very large, sometimes to the order of billions of points. Modern game engines such as Unity or Unreal are typically optimized for 3D meshes with a limited number of faces. One of the main challenges is to process the large point clouds and turn them into meshes to use in a game engine. Moreover, most of these models do not have color information, so we also need to reproduce the textures necessary for a proper immersion.
Finally, 3D models only are not sufficient to provide the full experience in understanding the Maya culture. We need to create an interactive experience, with pickable atifacts, pictures and videos of the site, and narrated key elements of the excavation. Eventually, we want to create an engaging story about the ancient Maya civilization and archaeology.