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UCLA Scholars and Students, International Team Resurrect Ancient Rome Digitally

Mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni officiated today at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project begun at UCLA and based at the University of Virginia that used advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome. The event took place at Rome's Palazzo Senatorio on Capitoline Hill, which overlooks the ruins of the ancient Forum.

An international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany employed the same high-tech tools used for simulating contemporary cities — including laser scanners and virtual reality — to construct the largest, most complete simulation of a historic city to date.

"Rome Reborn" encompasses nearly the entire ancient city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time, Rome was the multicultural capital of the Western world and had reached the peak of its development, with an estimated population of 1 million.

The simulation is a true three-dimensional model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate the environment with complete freedom, moving in any direction at will. Viewers can enter such important public buildings as the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, and the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city's largest place of worship.

As new discoveries are made, "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future versions, the project will include other phases in the evolution of the city, from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century. Video clips and still images can be viewed at www.romereborn.virginia.edu and at www.etc.ucla.edu.

In recent years, scientists, historians and archaeologists around the world have embraced the 3-D modeling of cultural heritage sites. Information technology has permitted them to recreate buildings and monuments that no longer exist or to digitally restore sites that have been damaged by the passage of time. The results can be used both in research, to test new theories, and in teaching, to take students on virtual tours of the historical sites they are studying. By several orders of magnitude, "Rome Reborn 1.0" is the most ambitious project ever undertaken.

"'Rome Reborn 1.0' is the continuation of five centuries of research by scholars, architects and artists since the Renaissance who have attempted to restore the ruins of the ancient city with words, maps and images," said project director Bernard Frischer, UCLA professor emeritus and director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. "Now, through hard work by our interdisciplinary team, we have realized their seemingly impossible dream. 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. We give special thanks to the Comune di Roma and its Museum of Roman Civilization (Rome) for the constant support and encouragement they gave the project from the start."

"This amazing model allows us to appreciate individual buildings of ancient Rome within a broad urban context and thus also to understand how the modern city took shape over time," said Diane Favro, co-initiator of the project and director of the Experiential Technologies Center at UCLA. "Numerous UCLA students explored advanced technology and global resources to create the 'Rome Reborn' model, an experience that transformed them from students into 21st-century scholars. In addition, students and faculty at UCLA have pioneered the educational application and evaluation of such historical digital recreations in classrooms at every level, from university to K–12, with overwhelmingly positive response. It is the ability to excite and inform viewers of all ages that makes such immersive recreations so compelling."

"This is the first time that engineers have succeeded in creating a hybrid computer model of an entire city based on born-digital and reborn-digital elements," said Gabriele Guidi of the industrial design, art, communications and fashion lab at the Polytechnic University of Milan. "The project was an enormous technical challenge, and now that we have successfully met it, we can easily start building up a library of other city models in museums around the world."

Favro and Frischer began the "Rome Reborn" at UCLA in 1996, collaborating with UCLA students from classics, architecture and urban design, who fashioned the digital models with continuous advice from expert archaeologists. As the project evolved, it became collaborative at an international scale. In 2004, the project moved its administrative home to the University of Virginia, but collaborations with UCLA continue. In addition, a cooperative research agreement was signed with the Polytechnic University of Milan.

Many individuals and institutions contributed to "Rome Reborn" including UCLA, the University of Virginia and Milan's Polytechnic University. Project advisers included scholars from the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Roman Civilization (Rome), Bath University, Bryn Mawr College, the National Research Council of Italy, the German Archaeological Institute, Ohio University, UCLA, the University of Florence, the University of Lecce, the University of Rome ("La Sapienza"), the University of Virginia and the Vatican Museums.

The first sponsors of the project were Kirk Mathews and the Creative Kids Education Foundation. Other sponsors have included: Alitalia, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Intel, Microsoft, Multigen-Paradigm, the National Science Foundation, the Rose Family of New York, Shuttle, Tecnark Italia, UCLA Academic Technology Services, the UCLA College of Letters and Science, the UCLA Division of Humanities, and the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.