Rome Reborn

[selden]

I wonder how much work it would take to port this to Celestia?

http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/

[ElChristou]

Bah... not much!

[t00fri]

And what would we do with it, then?

Bye Fridger

[ElChristou]

And what would we do with it, then?

Virtual gladiator combat in the Coliseum of course!

[LordFerret]

I recall seeing something on tv recently (Discovery channel?), about the entire city being reconstructed in virtual 3D... allowing the viewer to 'walk the streets of ancient Rome'. If not Rome, then something similar.

[selden]

LordFerret,

That is exactly what the Rome Reborn project is all about -- providing models of Rome at various stages of its development which can be used to study it. Over 7,000 buildings are already in place and they're considering opening it up for model production by others, with very stringent requirements about authenticity, of course.

[t00fri]

LordFerret,

That is exactly what the Rome Reborn project is all about -- providing models of Rome at various stages of its development which can be used to study it. Over 7,000 buildings are already in place and they're considering opening it up for model production by others, with very stringent requirements about authenticity, of course.

Since I am in Rome about once per year, I have visited the historical sites in Rome many times.

Certainly in the Forum Romanum region, many /outstanding/ buildings have been preserved or reconstructed according to historical documents. So these could certainly be "virtualized" quite authentically.

But apart from these relatively few "landmarks", about the far dominant number of the ancient buildings we have at best /fractional/ informations. Typically only parts of their fundaments are preserved, if any. So the crucial information about their 3rd dimension has been entirely lost in the course of time. Clearly only sufficiently important buildings were mentioned and described to some detail in historical documents...

So how is "authenticity" applied to this dominant number of buildings? I am certainly sceptical that detailed 3d information about as many as 7000 (!) ancient buildings should have been preserved!?

Bye Fridger

[selden]

Fridger,

I'll just have to refer you to the Website. They're doing the best they can from the limited data that's available.

[t00fri]

Fridger,

I'll just have to refer you to the Website. They're doing the best they can from the limited data that's available.

My doubts arose precisely AFTER visiting their website.

Bye Fridger

[dirkpitt]

I think it'd be next to impossible to achieve a believable 3-D reconstruction of ancient Rome without some level of... well, artistic license. In fact it's mentioned on the project web site that "speculative reasoning" has been used in some parts of the project. There's apparently enough data for important landmarks and street plans, but residential flats etc have been statistically filled in using several generic models.

[t00fri]

I think it'd be next to impossible to achieve a believable 3-D reconstruction of ancient Rome without some level of... well, artistic license. In fact it's mentioned on the project web site that "speculative reasoning" has been used in some parts of the project. There's apparently enough data for important landmarks and street plans, but residential flats etc have been statistically filled in using several generic models.

DW,

that perfectly matches my own impression after having had a look at their Website...

Hence, before rebuilding ancient Rome in Celestia , I really would like to enjoy realistic Mie atmospheres, good stars, general adaptive grid systems, dynamical loading and unloading of data files and many other features of prime importance ....

Bye Fridger

[dirkpitt]

You're no fun Fridger.. I was rather looking forward to ElChristou's hyper-realistic 1,000,000-poly Coliseum model, complete with animated characters of course! Unfortunately it is so complex it will end up requiring OGL 2 and only a quad-8800 will handle it..