Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Handheld gadget offers a window on Rome's past

Visitors to Rome will no longer have to rely on their imagination to see the ancient city at its glorious peak. Just point TimeMachine, a new handheld gadget produced by Ducati Myers and the University of Bologna, at famous sites like the Colosseum and it automatically displays a 3D reconstruction of the building.

The device is the first commercial application of the Rome Reborn project, an ongoing effort to reconstruct the city as it was in AD 320. The starting point of the project was an impressively detailed physical model of the city, some 15 meters across, built over a 40 years span in the twentieth century. That model was laser-scanned and digitised by an international team of researchers led by Bernard Frischer at the University of Virginia. The latest version, Rome Reborn 2.0, was unveiled at the SIGGRAPH conference in LA last week.

Fun though it is to fly over the ancient city and zoom in on specific buildings, it's when those flashy graphics meet present day Rome that Rome Reborn becomes most gripping.

That's where TimeMachine comes in. Point the device at a ruin and it displays the picture on a small screen. The gadget then uses image recognition to identify the delapidated buildin , and superimposes the virtual reconstruction of its heyday on top. You can then walk towards, or around the building to see the virtual reconstruction from any view. The viewer is given a moveable window on the past.

It's even relatively cheap to use - hiring the device costs around 5 Euros per hour, according to Joel Myers. So far TimeMachine is active at the Colosseum, and a version designed for the Forum should be available next month.

Colin Barras, online technology reporterLabels: graphics, history, interaction

Posted by Colin Barras at 5:09 PM

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