For most people, going to the museum is seeing a series of objects.
All of these objects are representative of the people that made it.
We can see that humans are more similar than different.
The British Museum has some of the most fantastic collections in the world.
Many objects are stored and very rarely visited.
Today, we have a huge potential to capitalise on new technologies...
...and help reach entirely new audiences around the world.
The ancient Maya lived in what is now Mexico, Honduras, Belize, and Guatemala.
It is a fascinating civilization that built these amazing cities.
They had an incredibly elaborate calendar and writing system...
...which took decades to decipher.
Alfred Maudslay is the greatest British explorer in the 19th century...
...that no one has ever heard of.
Maudslay spent decades taking photographs...
...and making plaster casts of some of the iconic sites of the ancient Maya world.
The Maudslay collection is the largest archive of plaster casts that we know of.
The cultural significance of these objects is priceless...
...and they’ve been in the archives of the British Museum ever since.
It’s a missing part of the story of the Maya.
In the Alfred Maudslay Collection we've got nearly 500 plaster casts of different monuments...
...800 glass plate negatives...
...and then we've got a plethora of his field notebooks and sketches and measurements.
It’s an amazing record.
Alfred Maudslay was himself a pioneer in new technology.
Photography was just emerging when he was out there in the 1880s.
And we’re really just continuing his pioneering ideas...
...using the new technologies of today.
For the photographs and the sketches, we’re doing high-res archival scanning.
And for the plaster casts, we’re using a 3D scanner...
...to make digital models of them.
Most of the monuments are so big...
...like of one monument, we’ve got 31 individual casts...
...and the way they are stored here, they are all over the place.
By making a 3D scan, we can bring them into a 3D environment...
...and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Over the last 130 years...
...the original monuments have been looted or eroded.
So this collection is the best record of them.
We are now seeing how many different things we can do with the 3D data...
...to make things more accessible to everyone.
The writing of the ancient Maya...
...was only really translated for the first time in the 1980s 1990s.
There’s still only a handful of people in the world who can do it well.
Studying the ancient Maya hieroglyphs is extremely important for many many reason.
There’s still millions of modern Maya that live today.
And so this is the cultural heritage.
The process of studying the Maya hieroglyphs...
...the traditional path is we use mostly photography...
...and then line drawing as a means of grappling with the highly visual aspect of it.
One of the really great things about these 3D models...
...is that we can study them with VR...
...to see details that you wouldn’t otherwise see.
You can change the light and you can inspect them from different angles...
...in a way that you can’t on a screen.
In terms of the decipherment Maya hieroglyphic writing...
...with Tilt Brush, we’re able to annotate the text...
...draw and emphasize things.
Making it much more visible and readily understandable than ever before.
There’s huge potential in terms of these applications.
What’s really exciting...
...is that by using new technologies we can start to reintegrate objects...
...with their original landscape.
The replica of the staircase that we have...
...show all the details that have been lost in the original...
...but some of the sections are actually missing pieces.
Fortunately for us, and very typical Maudslay...
...we do have photographs and a very very detailed drawing.
Using the cast scans and the drawing...
...we were able to fill in the missing pieces.
We’ve then used that 3D model...
...to robotically carve real stone...
...to recreate the hieroglyphic staircase.
We can subtractively engineer...
...a brand new staircase at exactly the same scale of one to one.
And then send it back to Palenque for people to experience at the site itself.
Using new technologies, we can make the past more accessible...
...to people like we’ve never been able to do before.
It was important for us...
...that all the content be made available in both Spanish and English...
...because we are collaborating closely with the source nations...
...where in the end, all this cultural heritage is coming from.
Everybody is entitled to gain knowledge about previous civilizations.
And this is certainly a huge step in that direction.
If people understand cultural complexity around the world...
...both past and present...
...then you grow tolerance in society.
This project provides a fantastic platform...
...to get great stories about our shared past out into the world.