Imagining the Past at Chichén Itzá

The product of more than four years of work, this repository builds on data collected during the making of the film Tales of the Maya Skies, a full-dome planetarium production that tells the story of ancient Maya cosmology. The film was led by ArtsLAB director David Beining and Alex Hall, then at the Chabot Space…

Mirroring Condor Flights in California

In this interactive project for California State Parks installed at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park (JPBSP), the visitor uses their outstretched arms to soar as a California Condor above Big Sur.  The visitors use their bodies to bank, dive and lift in virtual 3D space as they follow flight paths from actual California Condors. Our…

No Spectators: VR recording at the Smithsonian

  Led by Nora Atkinson and Sara Snyder at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, INSIGHT joined forces with Greg Downing of Hyperacuity, Raj Puran at Intel Corporation, and Jason Gholston at Sansar Studios  to create a VR experience as part of the Renwick Gallery’s 2018 exhibition No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man. The team…

Tracing Architecture & Epigraphy at the Ramesseum

Dr. Christian Leblanc (CNRS) leads the archaeological team at the Ramesseum, the Mansion of Thousands of Years of Ramses II in Western Thebes, Egypt.  Since 2000, INSIGHT has contributed to the ongoing scientific exploration of the Ramesseum. Despite significant dismantling and reuse in antiquity, the Ramesseum is a remarkably complete example of a Ramesside temple. …

Recording Quarries in Aswan & Gebel Silsilah

Beginning in November 02008, INSIGHT joined a team from Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) for an expedition in Egypt to study ancient quarries.  The goal of the field work was to test current thinking about how Egyptian quarries worked by studying traces of ancient excavations and visualizing cumulative extractions of stone over time. In…

Visiting Nakhtamun’s Tomb Chapel in VR

As part of a larger survey of Theban tombs, INSIGHT documented the tomb chapel of an ancient Egyptian priest called Nakhtamun (TT341), a name meaning “the god Amun is powerful”. The field work on site in Egypt brought collaboration with chemists in Dr. Philippe Jockey’s lab at Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. INSIGHT contributed…

Rebuilding an Acanthus Column in Delphi

Jean-Luc Martinez, an archaeologist with the Musée du Louvre, asked the INSIGHT team to help document and reconstruct a fragmentary column from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece.  The goal of the reconstruction was to validate Martinez’ hypothesis that the Omphalos (a well-known sculpture meant to mark the ‘center’ of the Hellenic world) once…

Making a Digital Twin for a Maya Stela

To document this stela with Queen Ix Mutal Ahaw for the de Young Museum in San Francisco, we used non-contact photometric stereo capture, a technique we developed with James Patterson at the Oxford University Robotics Department. This technique involves acquisition of multiple photographs under varying light & camera placement, as detailed in our paper here….

Connecting People Via VR Gaming at Mesa Verde

CyArk invited INSIGHT to join their work at Spruce Tree House and Balcony House with National Parks Service archaeologists. Subsequent field seasons added to the field data collected and led CyArk and the NEH to create Resonant: An Immersive Game for Connecting People to Cultural Heritage, seen in the clip below: The US National Park…

Replicating Carved Poetry at Angel Island

“The poems at Angel Island are among the most dramatic finds in American literature” – Karen L. Polster, University of California, Riverside. Between 1910 and 1940, as many as 175,000 Chinese immigrants were detained and processed at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco, California.  While interred under harsh conditions, many people carved poems into…

Reassembling the Avila Portal at USF

When the University of San Francisco set out to reassemble a historic Portuguese portal from a pile of stone fragments, they knew they’d found a hard problem.  Surprisingly, while the fragments they received were carefully labeled, there was no key for their reassembly.  Worse,  several sets of numbers were evidently being used as labels.  Traces…