Thread by @PaulMMCooper

One thing that has made Episode 5 of Fall of Civilizations TV so exciting to work on is the digital recreations of the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor, done by Thomas Chandler and his team at Sensilab, Monash University.

Virtual Angkor is a groundbreaking collaboration between Archaeologists, Historians and virtual reality specialists designed to bring the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor back to life in all its glory.

For more than 10 years, the Visualising Angkor Project has created 3D reconstructions of greater Angkor - from ecological reconstructions of villages outside the city, to animations of 13th Century eyewitness accounts of life at the Khmer capital.

And since 2015, the project has focused on the completion of an immersive simulation of Angkor Wat in the 12th Century, right at the height of the Khmer Empire.

The simulation has allowed researchers to track the paths of thousands of virtual people as they walk around the city, reconstructing how people may have ebbed and flowed around its forgotten pathways, and giving insight into how they may have lived.

The simulation handles day and night cycles, and allows us to see sunrise over the golden towers of Angkor for the first time in more than 500 years.

One of the funnest sides of the project is the use of 360 visualisations. If you watch on a mobile device, you can tilt and turn it so that you find yourself in the middle of a scene somewhere in medieval Angkor.

Some more 360 scenes:

Market: artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/visual…

Western Galleries:

Western Bridge:

It has been a real privilege to include this footage in Episode 5, and you can now watch the whole thing on YouTube:

To find out more about the remarkable work of the Sensilab team, you can visit their website here: virtualangkor.com

And they also received two in-depths features from Google Arts and Culture here.

Part I: artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/visual…

Part II: artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/visual…