This is Stella E, which is this big tall, how many feet tall is that? It must be about

35, 40 feet tall. Yeah, I think it's about 25 or 30 feet tall. So it looks a bit like, I suppose,

a totem pole or something like that with lots of carvings.

And on the front you've got a figure.

And then on the sides you've got these square glyphs, which are the writing.

Seth, I went to see Stella E, which is a huge stone carving made by the Maya civilization in what's now Guatemala.

Apparently it's the largest freestanding carved monument from the ancient Americas, and its surfaces covered with the symbols that the Maya used for writing. If I go closer to it, now can I go around the side? It's hard to see. Ah, here we are, yes. Hang on, Tom. I don't think you've been to Guatemala. No, you're right. I didn't actually go to Guatemala. I went to see it in an office in London while wearing a virtual reality headset. Well, it's very convincing. I'm, you know,

when you turn your head and you look around, everything tracks perfectly. So it's an extremely

convincing illusion. So you're looking at a scan of this stone monument

and you're able to walk around it and stuff?

Yes, all that kind of thing, but it wasn't actually a scan directly made

from the stone monument.

The scan was made from a bunch of plaster casts of the monument

that were made in the 1880s.

So it sounds like this is a copy of a copy. That's exactly right.

So I was looking at a virtual model made digitally of a virtual model made using plastercast.

It's sort of VR inside, it's old Victorian VR inside modern VR, then. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And it turns out that the Victorians were quite keen on their form of VR, rather as some people are quite keen on the modern form.

And just as I could see this distant artefact while remaining in London,

the Victorians were able to do the same thing.

But Victorian VR had a bit of a bumpy ride.

So it's not entirely dissimilar, again, to the story of modern VR,

...