Rome Reborn

Posted on 30. Nov, 2008 by Kerry Banks in International

Tourists attempting to make sense of the jumble of decaying ruins in Rome once had to rely on guide books and their imagination. But this situation has changed with the creation of Rome Reborn, the world’s biggest computer simulation of an ancient city. Reproduced on satellite-guided handsets and 3-D orientation movies in a theatre near the Colosseum, the reconstruction allows visitors to navigate the Roman capital, circa 320 A.D. Using the complex software, tourists can navigate through the buildings and plazas of the Forum, fly over the Temple of Vesta, wander through the massive Basilica of Maxentius, and walk the arena floor of the Colosseum or drop below ground level to look at the elevator cages that hoisted the lions and tigers into the arena for battle. Smoke, grime, graffiti and street scenes involving 60,000 virtual characters add to the realism.

Just like the ancient wonder, virtual Rome wasn’t built in a day. The first digital real-time reconstruction of the city is the result of a 10-year effort by an international team of architects, computer scientists, engineers and archaeologists led by Bernard Frischer, head of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. The undertaking was enormous—more than 100 people worked on the project.

Rome was at its peak in the fourth century, with over a million inhabitants. It was the largest metropolis the world had ever seen: not until Victorian-era London, 1,500 years later, did an urban area surpass Rome’s size. To create a digital version of the Eternal City, the research team scanned the “Plastico di Roma Antica,” a 1:250 scale model of the city carefully crafted from plaster that was completed in the 1970s. At that scale, the mighty Colosseum is just eight inches tall—but the model still covers 3,000 square feet. Collaborating with engineers from Milan Polytechnic, the Rome Reborn designers used lasers designed to measure jet aircraft to scan the entire model, which depicts the city as it looked during the reign of Emperor Constantine the Great. The scans were converted into digital form, and programmers worked to turn the scans into Rome. The work was highly detailed: each six-by-six section contained 60 million data points.

To insure accuracy, the team consulted leading scholars to refine high-resolution 3-D renditions for about 30 of the most famous buildings, inside and out. Designers based the 7,000 other buildings—apartments, baths, bakeries, warehouses—on precise laser scans of the Plastico di Roma Antica model. Because of its size and importance, Rome may be one of the most-studied cities in history. The urban centre of the classical world was 16 square miles, protected by 11 miles of walls. Its buildings have captivated architects for centuries, while classicists, historians and archaeologists have spent entire careers trying to understand how the city functioned.

For academics and researchers, the Rome Reborn model will be a way to test theories about exactly how the city worked and looked. One such question—What was the actual seating capacity of the Colosseum?–has already been answered. The great Roman amphitheatre, inaugurated by Titus in A.D. 80, had 76 public entrances and an additional 4 entrances reserved for the emperor. Seats were arranged according to the social status of the spectators. Those on the first three tiers from the top were usually reserved for the nobles while the common man used the seats on the fourth tier. Each entrance and exit was numbered, as was each staircase. Although the Colosseum was designed so that it could be filled or evacuated quickly, estimates of the carrying capacity varied wildly from 35,000 to 80,000. Researchers working on the digital project populated the model with virtual spectators to narrow that estimate down to 48,000 to 50,000 people.

Frischer has stated that the virtual modelling technique might be extended to other famous cultural heritage sites such as colonial Williamsburg, the Great Pyramids of Giza, and the Sacred Valley in Peru. “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.”

Meanwhile, the simulation has recently become available online at Google Earth, so you don’t have to travel all the way to Italy to see it. View the magic at http://earth.google.com.rome

Photo Credits:

#1: geocarta.blogspot.com

#2: wired.com

#3: daylife.com

Tags: Cities, Rome