Today is the Ides of March, and in commemoration of this famous day I thought it only fitting to report something related to visualizing Rome’s great cities.    Since 1997, researchers at the University of Virginia, UCLA, Politecnico di Milano, and several others have been reconstructing the great city of Rome from way back in A.D. 320.  They’ve modeled the city buildings, aqueducts, bridges, and more with amazing detail based on a wide variety of input sources.

The digital model reflects the sources of our knowledge about ancient Rome. These are, broadly speaking, of two kinds: (1) archaeological data about specific sites and features (“Class I”); and (2) quantitative data about the distribution of building types throughout the fourteen regions (or wards) of the city (“Class II”). Features in Class I are known from archaeological excavations and studies; coins; inscriptions; ancient literary sources; and artists’ views from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century. Buildings in Class II are known from two regionary catalogues (the Curiosum and the Notitia) dating to the fourth century A.D.

Their models are now available in Google Earth, and they are up to “Rome 2.0” which includes work from industry sources.

Rome Reborn 2.0 was jointly created by IATH, Procedural, and mental images in 2008. It runs on a 16-core Sun server.

Version 2.0 uses the 32 hand-made Class I models created at UCLA and Bordeaux and converted by IBM and IATH to 3D Studio Max format.

It completely replaces the Class II models derived from the physical model with procedural models created with the CityEngine software of Procedural using archaeological research undertaken by the Université de Caen and by IATH.

Thus, version 2.0 is greatly improved with respect to geometric detail. In versions 1.0 and 1.1, the detailing of Class II features (windows, doors, balconies, colonnades, porticoes, etc.) was provided by textures. In version 2.0, the features have been fully modeled, unlike versions 1.0 and 1.1 (which run only on a workstation), thanks to Mental Image’s RealityServer software it can be used on the Internet.

So fire up your browsers and go check it out, without worrying about Brutus sneaking up behind you.

via Rome Reborn.

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