The Virtual Angkor project brings to life scenes from the city of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power around the year 1300 CE. Together with teaching modules, 3D models of the metropolis provide an opportunity for students to learn about a site of great cultural, religious, and historical significance that has long been ignored by a Eurocentric approach to Medieval studies. Beautiful, lovingly crafted, and immensely detailed, the project represents the sum of an effort by academics from Australia, Cambodia, and the United States.
The project makes use of a wide range of sources, processes used to analyze the sources, and means of presentation. An analysis of these aspects of Virtual Angkor will provide a deeper understanding of the goals of the project and what influenced its creation.
Sources
The scholars working on Virtual Angkor relied on 5 main categories of sources:
- Surviving Sanskrit and Old Khmer inscriptions
- European writing, sketches, and early photographs of nineteenth-century Cambodia
- Detailed bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom
- Eye-witness accounts of a Chinese official sent to Angkor in the 13th century
- Modern archaeological research of Angkor, including airborne surveys
The project also made use of ethnomusicology work, botanical research, textile studies, and architectural surveys. Much written work created by the Khmer people has not survived as it was transcribed on palm leaf, but historical sources, including the surviving stone inscriptions, point to a vast body of cultural, religious, and scientific work.
Processes
The team behind Virtual Angkor began by modeling something integral to Khmer life: the elephant. From there they modeled the people of Angkor including “their ornaments, their attire, the objects that they carried, and the vehicles that carried them.” The structures and environment that the people populated came next. Worked into 3D models are virtual scans of artifacts from the area.
In 2014, the project began porting its models to the Unity engine. This process allowed them to impart dynamic actions onto their characters and models. The Virtual Angkor project became a full-fledged virtual environment
Today, the project contains three distinct components which all draw on LiDAR surveys and geospatial data.
- Interactive virtual map of Angkor and its surroundings
- Simulation of 24 hours in Angkor Wat with dynamic models acting on algorithmic input
- Virtual reality experience of Angkor
Presentation
There are several ways to interact with the Virtual Angkor project. First, the project provides short immersive clips that provide a snapshot of life at Angkor. These clips include sound and depict both common folk and royalty. Second, the project makes available a massive, navigable map of Angkor that allows users to explore the architecture and geography of the city and surrounding landscape. The third is the simulation of a day at Angkor which places dynamic, autonomous models in the 3D environment. This allows users to see a snapshot of life as it may have been for the Khmer in 1300 CE. Lastly, the project contains a truly immersive virtual reality experience that allows an even more up-close-and-personal view of the rendering.
These modes of interacting with the project are all presented alongside teaching modules that focus on different important aspects of Khmer society: Power and Place, Water and Climate, and Trade and Diplomacy.
The website is maintained by Monash University SensiLab in Melbourne with which several of the academics involved in the project are associated. It is easily navigable and accessible without the need for understanding complex software.
The goal of the project is to bring knowledge and understanding of an important piece of history to students of the humanities, and after exploring Virtual Angkor, I am left awed at the amazing work that went into bringing such an expansive experience to life. Without even delving deep into the teaching modules, I feel like I gained a better understanding of Khmer society, people, and history that I learned very little about in my education.
It leaves me wondering whether issues of Eurocentrism in academia are issues of accessibility, fixed perhaps by projects like this, or deeper, and more systemic. My intuition points to the latter. Projects like this are amazing resources, but they don’t necessarily fix deep-rooted issues within academia that led to Angkor being largely ignored in the first place.
– Jack
3 thoughts on “Reverse Engineering Virtual Angkor”
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Wow, this is so cool! These pictures almost look like they’re from a video game; they’re so beautiful. It does make me wonder how digital humanists who make reconstructions (models?) like this one balance facts and data (“known” stuff from source material) with the artistic polish that makes this site into such a nice finished product. Do they run the risk of assumptions or inaccuracies?
I’m so impressed by this website’s ability to take written history and create this experience that brings Angkor to life. I hope that there are more experiences like this that can bring other historical civilizations to life too. I hope that perhaps there will be websites that not only make scenes come to life like in this website, but perhaps provide animation to the scene to make ancient civilizations really look alive.
This is a very interesting project. It’s interesting to me how many different sources of data were used to give as accurate of a depiction as possible. I also like how interactive it is, it seems that the more interactive a DH project is, a general audience will engage with the findings more.