Belissimo! I went to Rome a couple years ago and this adds a lot to understand what I saw.<p>But there's one thing I'd love to see: the filth and life. I want to see horse manure and mud on the streets, urine and faeces pouring from houses, the immense slums that would surround the city but left so few archaeological remains, graffiti on the walls, wear and tear on the streets (like what you can see in Pompei), the smoke from kitchens, pubs and bakeries, etc.
This seems like a ripe topic for an academic/open source wiki approach to 3D modeling and representation. Imagine if some group, or academic consortium, got funding to build an MMO world and to make available to academics the tools to build it out--3D modelers like Sketchup for buildings, behavioural scripting for NPCs, economic modeling of the surrounding environment... all available for people to walk through.<p>Obviously no one history department has the budget to licence a serious game engine or maintain an open world; but one would think an endowment from a benefactor plus cooperation and funding from a group of seed universities would be enough to get it started.
Love these. I think the studio Altair4 makes some of the best visualizations <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIEYmxFgF4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIEYmxFgF4</a>. I once made a model of rome myself in opensim ;)
"an attempt to give you an opportunity to take a look at Rome as it really was, by the eyes of humans who lived there in that time".<p>They never mention _which_ time. Do we think they know that Rome still exists?
Here's an AMA by someone who also made a 3D model of Rome<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yf9rm/iama_classics_lecturer_and_roman_expert_who_spent/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5yf9rm/iama_...</a>
Great project.<p>It would be even greater if they add people in the streets, possibly walking, not static. That would turn it into a real city and not only perfectly conserved ruins.
There's an interesting mini-series on Arte (German-French funded TV channel without ads) which talks about History in videogames : <a href="https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/074699-004-A/history-s-creed-4-10/" rel="nofollow">https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/074699-004-A/history-s-creed-4...</a><p>"Kingdom Come Deliverance was created with crowdfunding to satisfy a hunger for historically accurate games. Extremely well researched, it provides a realistic portrayal of Bohemia in the middle ages avoiding all clichés."
Reminds me of this project, well done:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Synagogues_in_Germany/5jZUAAAAMAAJ?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/books/edition/Synagogues_in_Germany/5...</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cluU6n2W0c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cluU6n2W0c</a>
Is anybody working on an AR version of this? Where you walk through an archeological site and can see through your phone how it looked originally? I have been looking now and then but can't find anything like what I have in mind.
This is really cool. It's unclear if this is a community effort or not (getting page timeouts), but it would be great to see some experts in texture and lighting help bring this to the next level because the models already look great.
Any general use tools which can be used for such large scale modelling, not including minecraft which actually speaking seems terrible for the purpose.
I wonder what engine they use for this. It doesn't seem to be Unreal, Unigine or Unity.<p>I'd be curious to learn which one it is and why they choose it. :)