02/10/2019

Visgraf recreates a 2,000-year-old mummy in virtual reality.

Múmia Kherima em realidade virtual

When a fire struck the National Museum in September 2018, destroying almost the entire collection, regular visitors lamented the possibility of never seeing again the more than 2,000-year-old mummy of the young Roman-era woman Kherima. With the help of IMPA, technology has reversed at least some of the damage from the tragedy. The V-Horus (Virtual Egyptology) project, which has a team of 12 researchers from the National Museum, IMPA, Fiocruz, and PUC-Rio, recreated the piece in virtual reality.

Until Friday (4), the project will be on display to the public at the 7th Egyptology Week of the National Museum (SEMNA), in the Horto Auditorium, at Quinta da Boa Vista.

The V-Horus project is coordinated at PUC-Rio by designer Jorge Lopes, a researcher at the Industrial Design Division of the National Institute of Technology (INT), and involved collaboration with the Visgraf laboratory at IMPA, the NEXT and EAI laboratories of the Department of Arts & Design at PUC-Rio, and Fiocruz.

The digital reconstruction of the mummy was performed using tomography images of the specimen. With this data, it was possible to generate a geometric model with the exact measurements of the mummy and a single texture covering the entire body. From this model, a detailed process of restoration, editing, and digital painting was carried out using specialized software and photographs of body details. Subsequently, the image was placed in a virtual environment using the Unity platform.

Visgraf, which has been developing research and projects in virtual reality since 1997, was responsible for transforming the image generated by the three-dimensional data into virtual reality. "It was a complicated process because we had to recover many surface details that had been lost in the generation of the volumetric data," stated Luiz Velho, lead researcher at Visgraf.

Equipe do V-Horus trabalhando no laboratório do Visgraf, no IMPA

Together with Antônio Brancaglion Jr. (National Museum) and Sheila Mendonça (Fiocruz), the IMPA researcher selected a series of photos of mummies from different periods to analyze them before beginning the restoration process in the mathematical modeling of the figure in virtual reality. The research and development team also includes Andrea Lennhoff, Bernardo Alevato, Gerson Ribeiro, Andrea Malanski, Luiza Novaes (PUC-Rio), Sergio Azevedo, Pedro Luiz Von Seehausen (National Museum), and Djlama Lucio (IMPA).

With the work completed, the question remained: how to attract people to the project? The group's decision, Luiz explained, was to motivate the public through an immersive narrative. Through further research, the team developed a text about the details that make the Kherima Mummy special.

Like all embalmed bodies, the young woman from Thebes had her brain and viscera removed after death. During the wrapping process, they did something unconventional. Her body was stuffed with cloth and her limbs were wrapped separately. In this way, the body resembled that of a doll, with accentuated feminine features and an appearance closer to that of a living person.

According to the Visgraf coordinator, the project is interesting because it creates ways to experiment with processes in new media. "The team was very integrated and committed to the goal of delivering a new experience that blends art and technology."

For Luiz Velho, V-Horus carries a “philosophical question.” “The goal of the ancient Egyptians, when mummifying their dead, was to preserve the identity of those people. To some extent, we also work with this goal by recreating in virtual reality a piece that, thanks to the misfortune that occurred at the National Museum, would no longer be accessible to the public.”