The Temple Of Zeus

Using Virtual Reality technology, it is now possible for you to take a tour of the Temple Of Zeus, and see how it may have looked during the times of the Ancient Olympic Games.

This is a floorplan of the Temple Of Zeus. Click on a region you wish to look around. If you have the QuickTime VR player correctly installed, you will automatically be given a 360 degree view of the place you clicked.

About the images

The QuickTimeVR scenes you see were completely computer-generated. First, archeological material on the Temple of Zeus was researched. From a number of digs, photos, models, drawings, and legends, a rough floorplan and elevation were made. From there, research into Greek building techniques was applied to discover the multitude of self-similar ratios among all the measurements of the temple. An accurate floorplan was drawn on graph paper, and X-Y-Z coordinates were extracted. Then, the temple was hand-modelled in the POV-Ray raytracer. The resulting scene file is approximatly 400 lines. The entire temple is constructed from boxes and cylinders. A camera desciption was generated for each scene, and the scenes were rendered with a script that:

• Turned the camera once for each angle (16 shots per node, 22.5 degree increments.
• Parallelized the rendering across 16 Dec Alpha 3000 Workstations.

Each scene required approximately one hour to render. The entire rendered result represents over 200 hours of Alpha-hosted rendering.

Next, the files were brought to a Macintosh 6100/60 AV. The images were converted to PICT format with Debabelizer 1.6.1. The images were then stitched together with Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Tools Suite. Some custom MPW scripts were written to deal with non-PhotoCD resolution files. Upon completion, the files were flattened with "flatmoov" for distribution on the Web.