Senior PHP Engineer Vitaliy Fito created an interactive web project that allows you to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of 19th-century Lviv and virtually walk through the city at a time when the Poltva River still flowed in the open air. To implement this idea, the developer used a new artificial intelligence model Astra from OpenAI.
Senior PHP Engineer Vitaliy Fito created an interactive web project that allows you to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of 19th-century Lviv and virtually walk through the city at a time when the Poltva River still flowed in the open air. To implement this idea, the developer used a new artificial intelligence model Astra from OpenAI.
“I decided to test the new Astra model from OpenAI. I asked to make a 3D scene of Lviv from the time when the Poltva River was still flowing in the open air. I took historical photos from the Internet as a basis to recreate the area as accurately as possible. You can take a walk right in the browser,” Vitaliy Fito said on LinkedIn.
The interactive project is called "POLTVA / playground" and recreates the location "Lviv · Hetmanski Valy" as of around 1870.
The interface offers a simple navigation and control system for the 3D space. Using a dedicated “Walk” button, users can freely move around the city or start an automatic scene tour.
In addition, the developer has provided five fixed viewpoints — "01 Above Poltva", "02 On the Bridge", "03 Hausner", "04 Skarbek" and "05 Above the Roofs", which allows you to instantly change angles and locations.
For a deeper immersion into the atmosphere of historical Lviv, there is an option to turn on the soundtrack with audio effects.
In the "Sources and History" section, you can read more detailed reference materials.
The 3D scene recreates the appearance of the open river, promenades, and buildings of Hetmanskie Valy around 1870 — before Poltva was blocked off in this area in 1887–1889 and the modern Svobody Avenue was created. However, the opera house is not shown in the image, as it had not yet been built at that time.
The development is a spatial interpretation: although the overall development is based on historical sources, the profile of the riverbed, the exact distances, the colors, the details of the bridges and the everyday life are reproduced approximately. Since the exact boundary of the open riverbed and the collector near the Skarbek Theater in 1870 has not yet been established, the further blocks serve as a conditional environment, and such trifles as goods near the shops, clothes or curtains are an artistic reconstruction of the everyday life of that time.
The project includes key historical buildings, the architecture of which has been recreated based on ancient views, plans and lithographs. These include the three-story Hausner tenement house without the later fourth floor, the long Dicastery building opposite the river, the four-story Skarbek Theater with two inner courtyards, and the Jesuit church, which serves as a schematic background structure.
To recreate the urban space, neighborhoods, and the Poltva riverbed itself, studies of the riverbed network changes, Lemberg's plan, lithographs, and archival photographs of the theater facade and Karl Ludwig Street were used. However, the developer notes that the exact year for some images has not been established, and the combination of historical materials with modern coordinates still needs to be clarified.
