The archive · Education & Work · Product decision · 2022
MUSED bets browser tours of a scanned Great Pyramid can remake heritage education
Luke Hollis's MUSED scanned Khufu's pyramid interior for the Giza Project and shipped a free guided 3D web tour that drew 1,752 HN points.
MUSED
What the business is
MUSED is Luke Hollis's digital-heritage venture: it laser-scans monuments — the Great Pyramid, Luxor Temple, tombs at Giza, St. Catherine's Monastery — and publishes free guided 3D web tours plus teaching material, with paid custom tours as the suspected business model.
How it started
Hollis had been digitizing heritage sites with local partners: Luxor Temple with Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the University of Chicago, Queen Meresankh III's tomb at Giza, and St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai. In summer 2022 he scanned the interior of the Great Pyramid (Khufu's pyramid) for the Giza Project, using a Leica BLK 360 and a Matterport Pro 2 laser scanner plus photogrammetry photos, and interviewed 6th-grade social-studies teachers to shape teaching materials.
What happened
He finished a guided version of the tour and posted it to Hacker News on 2022-10-27, explaining that he built the viewer on Matterport's SDK with Three.js because the web reaches a wider audience than the Unity and Unreal versions, which were hard to download on slow connections. The thread drew 1,752 points and 280 comments: teachers, parents, VR users and former visitors called it one of the best virtual experiences they had seen, while others reported iOS Safari crashes and requested minimaps, WebXR and raw scan data. Replying to a question about hiring, Hollis said he had been working with a few friends and was still looking for product-market fit; he later pointed the thread to a detailed write-up of the Giza scan process on the MUSED blog.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
MUSED is Luke Hollis's effort to turn laser scans of world heritage into guided 3D web tours. Before the pyramid, he had digitized Luxor Temple with Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the University of Chicago, Queen Meresankh III's tomb at Giza, and St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, publishing each on a subdomain of mused.org.
In summer 2022 he scanned the interior of the Great Pyramid — Khufu's pyramid — for the Giza Project, using a Leica BLK 360 and a Matterport Pro 2 laser scanner plus photogrammetry, with inspectors from the Ministry on site. He chose a Matterport-SDK viewer rendered with Three.js because earlier Unity and Unreal builds were too heavy to download on slow connections, and interviewed 6th-grade social-studies teachers while designing the guided tour and teaching materials.
When he posted the finished guided version to Hacker News on 2022-10-27, the thread drew 1,752 points and 280 comments. Teachers and families described using it in class and at home, VR users explored it in headsets, and people who could never travel reported feeling they had finally been inside the pyramid. The same thread is candid about the business: asked about hiring, Hollis said he worked with a few friends and the team was still looking for product-market fit.
What has to be true
- The bet is concrete: a free, photoreal guided tour of the most inaccessible room on Earth was meant to prove that digitized heritage is education, not museum tech.
- The distribution choice mattered: Matterport SDK in the browser reached a wide audience where the earlier Unity and Unreal builds could not, because downloads were too heavy.
- Dated traction: the 2022-10-27 Show HN drew 1,752 points and 280 comments, with commenters reporting classroom, family and accessibility use of the tour.
- The founder's own words separate artifact from business: in October 2022 the team of friends was still looking for product-market fit — validation of the content, not yet of a revenue model.
What can be applied
When the artifact itself is off-limits — a pyramid interior, a fragile site — the scan is the product: a free guided web tour proved the audience existed before any business model did.
Aftermath
As of 2022-10-27 the guided tour was live and free at giza.mused.org, alongside MUSED's scans of Luxor Temple, Queen Meresankh III's tomb and St. Catherine's Monastery. Hollis was answering feedback in the thread and planning further scans and process write-ups; he described a small team working with a few friends and said they were still looking for product-market fit. No funding or revenue is documented in the material.
Sources
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