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Flyover Zone’s New Virtual Tour of Tenochtitlan
Coming soon to Yorescape!
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By David Hixson (Ph.D., Anthropology, Assist. Prof. of Art and Archaeology, Hood College, MD) and
Jeffrey Vadala (Ph.D., Anthropology, Lead VR Application Developer, The Brain Science Center Virtual Reality Lab, Mahoney Institute for Neurosciences, University of Pennsylvania),
Project Co-Directors
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Figure 1: An aerial view of Flyover Zone’s digital reconstruction of Tenochtitlan as it appeared in ca. 1500. Copyright 2022 Flyover Zone. All rights reserved.
“Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico…” — Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
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Tenochtitlan was once the imperial capital of the Mexica (whom we now call the Aztecs). This was a true city by any measure – a gleaming gem arising out of the waters of a shallow lake in the Basin of Mexico. Founded in 1325 and conquered by the Spanish in 1521, Tenochtitlan now is buried below modern-day Mexico City. Its importance is underlined by its inclusion on the prestigious list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Flyover Zone will shortly be releasing a virtual tour of the city, which we have been responsible for creating over the past 18 months. You will be able to find it on the company’s Yorescape platform for virtual tourism (www.yorescape.com). This article will, we hope, whet your appetite to travel back in time to the year 1500 and see Tenochtitlan at the height of its development.
A virtual tour taking you back in time requires two basic ingredients: a visual recreation of the lost world featured on the trip and an authoritative, up-to-date explanation of what you see at each stop. The big challenge we had to face in creating this tour was recreating this enormous site of which very little survives. The destruction wrought by the Spanish Empire after the conquest of Tenochtitlan has made archaeologically accurate architectural reconstructions even more difficult than they usually are. The bulk of Tenochtitlan is buried several meters below the modern, bustling city. Nevertheless, the ancient city left its indelible mark: the ancient causeways of Tenochtitlan became the major thoroughfares of Mexico’s capital, the pre-Hispanic aqueduct served as the historic Spanish water source, and the ancient sacred precinct was converted into modern main plaza (or zocalo).
To address the problem of sparse visible remains, we relied heavily on ethnohistoric research. Although exact architectural details were scant, luckily for us, a vast trove of documents written by the Spanish and Nahuatl-speaking peoples provided rich details about the residential, agricultural, political, and religious features of the Aztec landscape.
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Figure 2: Detail of a marketplace seen on Flyover Zone’s virtual tour.
Copyright 2022 Flyover Zone. All rights reserved.
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Working from these documents and the scholarship that explores them, we produced representations of Aztec spaces that are as rich and detailed as scholarly and technically possible. As a result, panoramic shots are filled with hundreds of items, objects, plants, and animals that contextualized the unique landscape at Tenochtitlan.
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Figure 3: Templo Mayor in Flyover Zone’s reconstruction of Tenochtitlan.
Copyright 2022 Flyover Zone. All rights reserved.
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To reconstruct the largest temples and plazas found in Tenochtitlan’s central region, we relied upon the survey of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and excavation data garnered from contemporary locations in contemporary Mexico City. Reconstructing the residential, agricultural, and natural spaces that made up the majority of Tenochtitlan’s cityscape was the largest technical challenge given that the city housed upwards of 200,000 people.
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Figure 4: An area of commoner housing in Flyover Zone’s reconstruction of Tenochtitlan.
Copyright 2022 Flyover Zone. All rights reserved.
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Our VR team studied each situation and built an authoritative modular model of the various social contexts within the ancient city. We then used Unreal Engine Procedural City Generator to rapidly layout a fully generated city using a procedural ruleset that organized the built the environment of Tenochtitlan's vast landscape into zones. We know (from ethnohistoric sources) that the ancient city was organized into zones. Each zone in our modular tour was derived from studies that explored Aztec social organization and the resulting settlement patterns that shaped the unique landscape.
The resulting simulacrum of Tenochtitlan was then reviewed by a team of preeminent scholars, archaeologists, and ethnohistorians for accuracy and precision. As it stands, this reconstruction of Tenochtitlan contains 25,000 fully modeled architectural spaces, a fully 3d terrain and water-system, millions of objects, artifacts, plants, and a fully accurate sky system that can be manipulated to show different times of the day.
Our virtual tour has 20 stops giving you panoramic views of the city from the air. You will also see many terrestrial views where you can learn about the city’s temples, housing, markets, and urban infrastructure such as causeways, aqueducts, and canals. We hope that our first tour of these wonderful but long vanished sights whets your appetite to take Flyover Zone’s tours of other Mesoamerican sites that we plan to bring you in the coming months and years.
¡Buen viaje!
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