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…
Category: Academic Research
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. …
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….