Co. Design brings to our attention a new 3-D software, developed by the French firm Dassault Systèmes, Harvard University, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where anyone with a computer can roam the famous Giza plateau and wander through its pyramids for an archeologist’s close-up look at the mummies, tombs, shafts, and artifacts as they look now--and might have looked when pharaohs were in residence. The software is already being used in Harvard’s Egyptology courses. “The project has allowed my students and colleagues to visualize the Giza data and update and integrate them in a way that was not possible in the past,” says Peter Der Manuelian, the Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard (see photo below). That means students and online viewers can see 3-D objects from multiple angles: Things like inscriptions on the back of a statue, or close-ups that you couldn’t do if you were viewing an object in a museum’s glass case.
