WINDING
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37 of its windings have been traced through X-ray CT by the Vesuvius Challenge. Ink layers show where models detect ink; letters visible here are candidates for expert reading. Drag to look around. Scrub to unroll.
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Meshes: OBJ or PLY with texture coordinates (UVs), one per winding. Layers: PNG, JPG or TIFF images laid out on those UVs: an X-ray layer, an ink layer and an optional comparison layer. The manifest says which file is which, the voxel size, and who made the data.
PHerc. 139 is one of the papyrus rolls carbonized when Vesuvius buried Herculaneum in 79 CE. It is too fragile to open, so it was scanned with X‑rays at the ESRF synchrotron in Grenoble. It is held by the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli.
Each sheet in the 3D view is one winding of the roll, traced through the CT volume by the Vesuvius Challenge. The shapes are the real ones, from the public 9.362 µm meshes. The X‑ray layer is the CT intensity on each surface. The Published ink (2.4 µm) layer is the Vesuvius Challenge's public ink detection on the 2.4 µm scan. In 3D it is drawn through a local‑contrast filter so letter‑sized strokes stand out; the close‑up view shows the published preview unfiltered, downscaled to 2,400 px.
Unrolling lays the windings end to end, outermost first, the way a reader would open the roll. Each traced winding runs a little past one full turn, so roughly a tenth of the 2.8 m strip repeats surface from its neighbour.
Sources: open data bucket PHerc0139/segments/*/mesh/*9.362um.tifxyz, surface-volumes/9.362um…zarr and ink-detection/downsampled. Data: Giorgio Angelotti, Stephen Parsons, Sean Johnson, Elian Rafael Dal Prà, Johannes Rudolph, Paul Tafforeau, Alessandro Mirone, Paul Henderson, Hendrik Schilling, Forrest McDonald, David Josey, Youssef Nader, C. Seth Parker, W. Brent Seales. Vesuvius Challenge - CT Scans of Herculaneum Papyri. Vesuvius Challenge. Licensed CC BY‑NC 4.0. The page's code (HTML, CSS, JS and tools/) is Apache 2.0; see the Space's README.
Made by Chase Hendrick.
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