Ancient Rome comes back to life in virtual model

Ancient Rome comes back to life in virtual model
By Stephen Brown
11 June 2007
Reuters News


ROME, June 11 (Reuters) - Tourists puzzled by the jumble of buildings in classical and modern Rome can now find their bearings by visiting a virtual model of the imperial capital in what is being billed as the world's biggest computer simulation of an ancient city.

"Rome Reborn" was unveiled on Monday in a first release showing the city at its peak in 320 AD, under the Emperor Constantine when it had grown to a million inhabitants.

Brainchild of the University of Virginia's Bernard Frischer, Rome Reborn (www.romereborn.virginia.edu) will eventually show its evolution from Bronze Age hut settlements to the Sack of Rome in the 5th century AD and the devastating Gothic Wars.

Reproduced for tourists on satellite-guided handsets and 3-D orientation movies in a theatre to be opened near the Colosseum, Frischer says his model "will prepare them for their visit to the Colosseum, the Forum, the imperial palaces on the Palatine, so that they can understand the ruins a lot better".

"We can take people under the Colosseum and show them how the elevators worked to bring the animals up from underground chambers for the animal hunts they held," he said, referring to the great Roman amphitheatre inaugurated by Titus in 80 AD.

Frischer's model is sourced from ancient maps and building catalogues detailing "apartment buildings, private houses, inns, storage facilities, bakeries and even brothels", plus digital images of the vast "Plastico di Roma Antica" model built from plaster of Paris in 1936-74, which measures 16 by 17 metres.

The "reverse modelling" by Frischer and the Politecnico di Milano and University of Florence enables scholars to populate ancient monuments with virtual reality figures for experiments on practical details like ventilation, capacity or acoustics.

"For example, in scholarly literature the Colosseum has a great reputation for being a great people mover where people could find their seats very quickly. But estimates of the carrying capacity vary wildly from 35,000 to 78,000," he said.

Engineers have populated his model with virtual spectators to narrow down that estimate to 48,000-50,000 people.

The model can also show how the Romans, who worshipped the sun and moon, aligned their buildings with the summer solstice.


ANCIENT ROME REBORN IN VIRTUAL TOUR
11 June 2007
ANSA - English Media Service

An international team of experts has recreated Ancient Rome in a computer-graphics version that nails down the last column, statue and brick of the Colosseum, Senate, Forums, Temple of Venus and other famous sites.

Web surfers will be able to take a virtual tour of the CGI recreation of Rome at the time of the Emperor Constantine in 320 AD.

Meanwhile, a Roman cinema is being refurbished to give visitors to present-day Rome a 3D experience of the ancient city - complete with chance encounters with emperors, poets, orators and ordinary citizens.

The virtual recreation of Rome, dubbed Rome Reborn, is the fruit of ten years of research and development by academics and computer whizzes in America, Britain, Germany and Italy.

"It's the first time a complete urban fabric has been recreated," said Professor Bernard Frischer of UCLA, unveiling the two-million-dollar project at Rome's Campidoglio on Monday.

A first peek at the 31 monuments and 7,000 buildings is already available at www.romereborn.virginia.edu and the whole thing should be posted at a special new site within a year, Frischer said.

In the meantime, a once-glorious cinema around the corner from the Colosseum is being done up to offer cinema tours of the reborn city.

Rewind Rome will use the cityscape created for the web project and people it with walking, talking Romans of the time that spectators can 'approach' using 3-D specs.

The half-hour film will cost "no more than the price of a normal movie ticket," said Alberto Francesconi of Virtuality Srl, the project creators.

"It's one more thing we're doing to boost Rome tourism," said Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni.

"The Colosseum movie theatre will be turned into a place where people can relive the emotions of seeing Ancient Rome".

The film will be premiered on April 21, 2008, the traditional anniversary of Rome's foundation in 753 BC.


International Team Rebuilds Ancient Rome Digitally
11 June 2007
Ascribe News


ROME -- Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni will officiate at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project based at the University of Virginia and begun at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to use advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome. The event will take place at 2 p.m. in the Palazzo Senatorio on the Campidoglio. An international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany employed the same high-tech tools used for simulating contemporary cities such as laser scanners and virtual reality to build the biggest, most complete simulation of an historic city ever created. "Rome Reborn 1.0" shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.

"Rome Reborn 1.0" is a true 3D model that runs in real time. Users can navigate through the model with complete freedom, moving up, down, left and right at will. They can enter important public buildings such as the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, or the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city's largest place of worship.

As new discoveries are made, "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future releases, the "Rome Reborn" project will include other phases in the evolution of the city from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century A.D. Video clips and still images of "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be viewed at www.romereborn.virginia.edu .

In recent years scientists, historians and archaeologists around the world have embraced 3D modeling of cultural heritage sites. Information technology has permitted them to recreate buildings and monuments that no longer exist or to restore digitally sites that have been damaged with the passage of time. The results can be used both in research to test new theories and in teaching to take students on virtual tours of the historical sites they are studying. By several orders of magnitude, "Rome Reborn 1.0" is the most ambitious such project ever undertaken.

Bernard Frischer, director of the "Rome Reborn" project and director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, stated, "'Rome Reborn 1.0' is the continuation of five centuries of research by scholars, architects and artists since the Renaissance who have attempted to restore the ruins of the ancient city with words, maps and images. Now, through hard work by our interdisciplinary team, we have realized their seemingly impossible dream. This is just the first step in the creation of a virtual time machine, which our children and grandchildren will use to study the history of Rome and many other great cities around the world. We give special thanks to the Comune di Roma and its Museum of Roman Civilization (Rome) for the constant support and encouragement they gave the project from the start."

Diane Favro, co-initiator of "Rome Reborn" and director of the Experiential Technologies Center at UCLA said, "This amazing model allows us to appreciate individual buildings of ancient Rome within a broad urban context, and thus also to understand how the modern city took shape over time. Numerous UCLA students explored advanced technology and global resources to create the Rome Reborn model, an experience that transformed them from students into 21st century scholars."

Gabriele Guidi of INDACO Lab at the Politecnico di Milano said, "This is the first time that engineers have succeeded in creating a hybrid computer model of an entire city based on born-digital and reborn-digital elements. The project was an enormous technical challenge, and now that we have successfully met it, we can easily start building up a library of other city models in museums around the world."

The "Rome Reborn" project was begun at UCLA in 1996 by professors Favro and Frischer. They collaborated with UCLA students from classics, architecture and urban design who fashioned the digital models with continuous advice from expert archaeologists. As the project evolved, it became collaborative at an international scale. In 2004, the project moved its administrative home to the University of Virginia, while work in progress continued at UCLA. In the same year, a cooperative research agreement was signed with the Politecnico di Milano.

Many individuals and institutions contributed to "Rome Reborn" including the Politecnico di Milano ( http://www.polimi.it ), UCLA ( http://www.etc.ucla.edu/ ), and the University of Virginia ( www.iath.virginia.edu ). The advisors of the project included scholars from the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Roman Civilization (Rome), Bath University, Bryn Mawr College, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, the German Archaeological Institute, Ohio University, UCLA, the University of Florence, the University of Lecce, the University of Rome ("La Sapienza"), the University of Virginia and the Vatican Museums.

The first sponsors of the project were Kirk Mathews and the Creative Kids Education Foundation. Other sponsors have included: Alitalia, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Intel, Microsoft, Multigen-Paradigm, the National Science Foundation, The Rose Family of New York, Shuttle, Tecnark Italia, UCLA Academic Technology Services, the UCLA College of Arts and Letters, the UCLA Division of Humanities, and the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.

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CONTACTS: Jane Ford, jford@virginia.edu, University of Virginia, phone +1 434-924-4298, fax +1 434-924-0938

Carolyn Campbell, ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, phone +1 310-825-6540, fax +1 310-267-0110

Barbara Orrico, borrico@dagcom.com, Politecnico di Milano, phone +39-02-890 54165