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Digital model of Rome, Rome Reborn
Rebuilding Rome
By Joshua S. Hill
Monday, August 13, 2007
Technology can be said to be the doom of many industries and the bane of many an existence, but there is no denying the good it has done in the past several decades. Yet, it is often the seemingly trivial developments made thanks to technology that reap the most reward. And often, it is for nothing more than an ability to look differently at history.
A team from the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory, the UCLA Experimental Technology Center, the Reverse Engineering Lab at the Politecnico di Milano and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities of the University of Virginia have been working steadily for 10 years on a monumental project to create a digital model of Rome, circa 320 A.D, known as Rome Reborn.
Often left out of technological advancement for being the 'soft' set of studies, humanities have had to struggle along without the advancement that supercomputers and advanced graphics design has brought to the tech and graphics fields. With the intention of providing a look in to what the city of Rome looked like at the time, the combined team is showing just how it is that those within different branches of humanities can use technology to their advancement.
The digital environment was created from a combination of physical scans taken from a scale model of the city, as well as data grafted from ancient maps. The end result was the creation of over 7,000 buildings, spread across a digital landscape of 25 kilometers, and seven buildings re-created both inside and out.
The team behind the project designed the software that runs Rome Reborn, and is in the process of redesigning the software so that the project can be distributed across the internet, and in such tools such as Google Earth. When this is accomplished, the hope is that they will be able to provide anyone with the opportunity to take a visual tour through Ancient Rome.
www.romereborn.virginia.edu/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/photogalleries/rome-reborn/index.html
Joshua can be reached at: letters@canadafreepress.com
