romereborn.gifThose clever folks at the IATH at the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia are receiv­ing much deserved accol­ades for their truly breath­tak­ing digital model of ancient Rome. Rome Reborn 1.0 (and accom­pa­ny­ing web­site) are visu­ally stun­ning and the main­stream media are cov­er­ing this with great detail. Billed as the largest digital model of an his­toric city ever under­taken, it provides research­ers with the oppor­tun­ity to vir­tu­ally walk the streets in real time and in many cases wander inside and look around. The model was con­struc­ted by hand and then digit­ized over the past dec­ade. This is a massive under­tak­ing and what, aside for the scale of the under­tak­ing, makes this of great import is the atten­tion to mak­ing this a fluid work in pro­gress. Bernie Frischer’s speech, over ten years ago, intro­du­cing the pro­ject envi­sioned this fluid­ity and it is trib­ute to those involved that the goals have been pre­served over the span of this enorm­ous pro­ject. It has mile­stones, but does not have an end­point. The pro­ject, like the digital model, is fluid. It reflects cur­rent appre­ci­ation and under­stand­ing, but will organ­ic­ally evolve as new inform­a­tion is intro­duced.
The cre­at­ors of the pro­ject have just released the first digital fly-throughs of Rome Reborn as part of the unveil­ing. They have yet to determ­ine how to make the model itself pub­licly ‘browsable.’ We are just scratch­ing the sur­face in this excit­ing new field of visu­al­isa­tion. New uses for these tools are just being pro­posed and attemp­ted. My own small exper­i­ments in con­struct­ing small scale 3D vir­tual streets­capes as an inter­face to explor­ing the lives of those that walked those streets are one tiny little aspect of this sphere of research. I use a rich spa­tial rep­res­ent­a­tion as a front end to manu­script census records and tax rolls. With Rome Reborn, inan­im­ate objects push our tech­no­lo­gical cap­ab­il­it­ies. My appet­ite is whetted for the time that we can start remove the static tem­poral aspects that con­strain these digital mod­els to spa­tial rep­res­ent­a­tion, and begin to allow for the tem­poral explor­a­tion across time, not just a slice in time.
I have to say that after view­ing the site in three browsers, the text on the site is abnor­mally tiny…just barely vis­ible. As many of the IATH pro­ject they do love to use Flash to medi­ate the users inter­ac­tion with their data. I have been accused of choos­ing too small a point size, but this is smal­ler by half again. How­ever, the pro­ject is just so inter­est­ing that I per­sisted in squint­ing to read about it.
I love terms like ‘optim­ized the city model to run in real time.’ How digit­ally god­like can one pre­sume to be? Too cool. Imme­di­ate per­cep­tions of the pro­ject lead me to con­sider that next chal­lenges for the immers­ive exper­i­ence will be to for addi­tional sens­ory aspects, such as audio to be added to the model. There was an inter­est­ing post­ing on H-Urban yes­ter­day about just this facet — the concept of digit­ally mod­el­ling the sounds of a 19thC city. I sense that the baroque sym­phonic melod­ies that accom­pany the fly-throughs may not quite be tem­por­ally accur­ate ;-) I am also struck by the lack of Roman inhab­it­ants. Frischer noted in 1996 that they did not want to cre­ate a ghost town, but I can’t see people any­where and des­pite the mag­ni­fi­cent archi­tec­ture I am quite inter­ested in the Romans them­selves as well as the products of their endeav­ours; I want to appre­ci­ate the works of Biondo and the explor­a­tion of the run­nings of ancient Rome.These little cri­ti­cisms don’t dis­tract from the enorm­ous achieve­ment that this model rep­res­ents, and it is trib­ute to its suc­cess that it sparks the cre­ativ­ity in oth­ers to add to it and build upon such an accom­plish­ment. It’s great because you get it and you want more.

Addi­tion­ally:

  • Digital Forum

    The recon­struc­tion of the Roman Forum is an example of the smal­ler micro­pro­jects that Rome Reborn seeks to draw together as part of the lar­ger recon­struc­tion. This a very com­pre­hens­ive site. I like the cam­era view­points in the timemap that com­bine the recon­struc­tion with a mod­ern view of the remains. The VR lets you adjust your view in either time­plane and see the results.