The institute is committed to achieving the highest possible scientific accuracy for its real-time and internet projects. To achieve this level of authentication, the team there works in close collaboration with leading scholars and cultural authorities as well as technology and computer graphics (CG) specialists. They also employ advanced technology, including Creator from Presagis for content creation.
The institute's largest project to date is virtual model of the city of Ancient Rome at its peak in 320 AD. Ultimately, this historically accurate digital re-creation will offer a comprehensive illustration of the Eternal City's urban development over the fifteen centuries from the late Bronze Age, when humans first settled in the area, and the early Middle Ages.
The project has its origins in 1974 when Professor Bernie Frischer, the institute's director, first visited Rome. It was during this visit that Frischer, who holds a PhD in classical languages and literature, first saw the "Plastico di Roma Antica," a physical model of the ancient city.
This 1/250 scale model of Ancient Rome took over 40 years to construct, measures 60 feet across, and can only be viewed from a balcony above. Upon seeing the model, Frischer began to think of ways to get viewers closer to the ancient city. Unfortunately, despite a good deal of investigation and research, Frischer found that the technology of the day would not allow him to realize his vision.
Then, in the early 90s, Frischer, who by then had become a tenured professor of Classics at UCLA, was introduced to Presagis Creator. Creator allows users to create optimized high-fidelity real-time 3D content for visual and urban simulations. Its powerful plug-in architecture along with its integrated and extensible toolset provide interactive real-time 3D modeling for creating precise visual content and synthetic environments.
Unlike other 3D content creation software tools, Creator allows modelers to input exact architectural measurements, and Frischer knew that this feature in particular would be extremely valuable on the Rome project.
With the right tools now in-hand, a team led by Frischer and his colleague UCLA Architecture Professor Diane Favro at UCLA began rebuilding ancient Rome in earnest. Their approach to the model was to start at the city centre-the Roman Forum-and to work outwards in concentric circles to the city walls. To begin, they used Creator for both the Roman Forum and the Colosseum and a radiosity-based method for baking in the lighting solutions.
While the models were visually successful for the time, they appeared to be floating in space, so the team built context with an elevation map and filler architecture in the landscape to make the two structures appear to be part of an urban fabric.
In order to create textures and references for the filler architecture for their virtual model, the team recruited engineers at the Reverse Engineering Lab of the Politecnico di Milano to create digital scans of the Plastico di Roma Antica model. Because they could access the model only from above and because the model was built to be seen from only above, the results were less than ideal for virtual reality applications.
Working with post-processing tools, the Milan team corrected the distortions by hand and then used Creator and another 3D content creation tool to create models from the digital versions of the forms. The team then applied textures and added interactivity to the model via OpenFlight.
The first version of Rome Reborn was released in June of 2007 and represents the work of an international team based at the University of Virginia, UCLA, and the Politecnico di Milano. It is a mobile simulation that runs on a Shuttle workstation with an Nvidia 8800 card and enables users to move around the model at an impressive 20 frames per second.
The virtual model features two types of buildings. Class 1 includes buildings that are supported by hard data and are reconstructed with 100% accuracy, and Class 2 includes both buildings and infrastructure-bridges, canals, and roads-that archeologists know existed but can only approximate their look and location.
Although the first version of the virtual model met with great enthusiasm, the team is pushing onward. They are currently upgrading the geometric detail on the models for a new version of the project. Using geometric textures, each upgraded model will have an average of approximately 10,000 polygons. Upon completion, Rome Reborn 2 will include 7000 reconstructed buildings that cover 10 square kilometers of terrain.
This next version will be published via the Internet as an interactive model that will allow users to explore the ancient city in real-time and high resolution. When it is released in the spring of 2009, Rome Reborn 2 will be the largest virtual reconstruction, cultural heritage, and digital archaeology project to date.
