Download source Description
Presents from Past Civilizations is a history gift workshop. It turns photos of murals and artifacts in museums into interactive explainer web pages with Tripo image-to-3D, so every visitor can take a piece of history home.
Two works are finished so far:
- Zhang Qian on the Silk Road: based on the mural in Cave 323 of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, it follows Zhang Qian's route as an imperial envoy. Interactive narration takes you through his detention by the Xiongnu, his long journey to the Greater Yuezhi, and the trade clues behind Shu cloth and Qiong bamboo staffs.
- The Bronze Galloping Horse: 83 seconds, three chapters and nine lines that tell the story of the national treasure behind the phrase "a heavenly horse soaring across the sky."
Each pairs line-by-line narration with a historical world that explains the mural or artifact in front of you. Both were made with the team's own project tool: following its guide, anyone can fill in source links and names and connect Tripo to turn their own photos into new history explainer pages, starting from photos from the National Museum of China or the Dunhuang Academy and stepping into any historical world.
This gift is for every visitor who stands before history. At exhibitions, people often can't make sense of what they see and can't take it with them; the team wanted to close that last mile.
The project is open source. It is provided as source code and needs to be built locally; it runs on Node.js and WebGL2.
How Tripo was used
Tripo image-to-3D is the core step that turns historical sources into gifts.
- Assets for both works: the Shu cloth, Qiong bamboo staffs and figures in Zhang Qian on the Silk Road, and the artifact props in The Bronze Galloping Horse, were all generated as GLB files from reference photos with Tripo image-to-3D, replacing traditional manual modeling.
- The creation tool: it integrates the Tripo API, so entering photos and names batch-generates the 3D assets for a new story; according to the team, history lovers with no 3D background can get usable artifact models in minutes.
- The full workflow: source photos become models through Tripo image-to-3D, then interactive WebGL2 explainer pages.
