Deconstructing Virtual Angkor Wat

For this most recent assignment, I decided to write my “deconstruction” of a Digital Humanities project on a virtual version of Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world and located in Cambodia (you can access the project here). The temple complex was built in the 12th century in what is now northwest Cambodia for the Hindu god Vishnu. As you can see below, a 2D drawing of the Angkor Wat even appears on the Cambodia flag.

Virtual Angkor was created from a collaboration between staff from SensiLab, UT Austin, Monash University, and Flinders University (find collaborators here). The project was built to be used in classrooms and students are given the ability to explore the intricacies of the temple and apply this newfound access to the historical building to better understand the importance of Angkor Wat when it was built. The project uses a variety of technological strategies, including modeling, simulation, mapping, animation, and 3D scanning (find more information here).

To “deconstruct the project,” the first aspect to look at is the data and sources used by collaborators. The full bibliography is available here, but one of the issues in regards to research on Angkor Wat that was pointed out on the site is that little written on the temple has lasted through the years. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t provide any details on how they took their limited sources and applied them to their modeling software. Although I imagine that the software used was incredibly complicated, it would be interesting as a consumer of the project to learn more about how the project was completed. However, the visuals of Angkor Wat created by the team are stunning, and as you can see in the picture above the results are quite stunning. You can find more views of the final project here through recordings of the simulation.