- What is the goal of the project?
The project is made to educate students about:
- Trade and diplomacy: exploring Angkor’s market place and trade between the East and Southeast Asia.
- Climate variability: Angkor’s relationship with water and its hydraulic system
- Political structure: effects of Suryavarman II’s reign in the form of architecture and design.
Virtual Angkor is an online simulation that mimics a 24-hour life cycle during the 13th century Angkor civilisation. It is an educational platform where users can interact and understand how the impact of the factors listed look like on a day-to-day basis.
- Which academic fields (i.e history) do you see the project in conversation with?
This overlaps a lot of fields, I think people can look at it from a historical, architecture, art, archaeological, economic or political point of view .
- What kinds of data is being used? Is the data available for broader use? Would you want it to be?
According to “Sources” on the Virtual Angkor website, the data used are available online and in print.
The most important one according to it is Zhou Daguan’s journal – as it gives a first-hand recount of interactions between an outsider and the civilization itself.
The bibliography also reveals several published research papers available online – on archaeology, the effects of climate change…etc and texts such as a historical fiction novel A Woman of Angkor, and several other books mainly describing Cambodian history from ancient times to the 21st Century.
- Processes (Analysis, digitization, remediation of those sources)
Virtual Angkor is an online simulation that analyses the primary and secondary online/print sources to recreate the environment of the civilisation as accurately as possible in virtual reality format.
- Modeling – 3D modeling of historical architecture artifacts, people…etc which created a virtual world.
- Simulation – tracking the agents of the virtual world to mimc how Angkor operates in its time.
- Mapping – Using available maps of temple complexes, roads, canals…etc to compare the structure of the virtual world and the real world.
- 3D Scanning – Using 3D scanning to model and depict realistic artifacts from Angkor. – capturing physical models integrating them into the virtual world.
- Animation – using animation cycles to create realistic motions, creating complex behaviors of people to best mimic the environment of the Angkor civilisation.
- Presentation (Publication on the web)
Virtual Angkor website tries to be as transparent as they can with their work by including processes and sources in their website.
The main content are the videos in the section called “Angkor 360”.
These are panoramic 360 degrees videos of a casual day in ancient Angkor civilisation from different parts of the Angkor complex such as from a house, the canal or the village as a whole.
Recommended to pair with a virtual headset, it uses technology to communicate humanistic aspects- the environment, the people, and the politics of Angkor.
The website provides learning modules, and instructions for the classroom to best interact with the 360 panorama videos. The modules are :
- Power & Place
- Water & Climate
- Trade & Diplomacy
Bibliography
–. “Virtual Angkor.” Virtual Angkor, 2018, www.virtualangkor.com/.
Burgess, John. “A Woman Of Angkor.” Amazon, River Books, 2013, www.amazon.com/Woman-Angkor-John-Burgess/dp/6167339252.
