Virtual Ancient Rome in 3D
January 20, 2022 12:51 PM   Subscribe

 
and people!

pretty much detest VR for everything but I'll make an exception for virtual time travel, or even modern-day tourism I guess

"Rome" was just a word on a page until I decided to watch the HBO series, which piqued my interest more. Then The Storm Before The Storm filled in more details. The deeper emperor-by-emperor history of the podcasts were too much of a trivia-heavy/modern-day-import-lite slog for me but the economics of a parasitical imperial metropolis sucking wealth from an entire continent for centuries still holds much interest.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:59 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


my recent virtual time travel itch has been watching academic historians nerd out on the authenticity of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. Granted most of those game maps are not at 1:1 to reality, but it's neat to see how you can use a game to give someone a more immersive idea of what these ancient cities looked like in their heyday.
posted by bl1nk at 1:15 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


Where can I find out what tools they're using to model this? My view-source and fork-this-project keys are getting itchy.
posted by mhoye at 1:21 PM on January 20, 2022


Grime… There was this video that came out years ago about a 747 landing on an LA freeway made by two guys in a bedroom. They had found a 3D model of a 747 and used that, but something looked horribly wrong. One of them knew someone who worked at the airport and they got to go there and look at a real 747 up close. What they saw was dirt. Lots of it. So they went home, and dirtied up the texture map, and lo and behold, the plane in the video looked real. Yeah, this video looks too clean and the texture maps form repeated patterns on the buildings. It’s really interesting to maybe get an idea of the forms of buildings there but a city that ain’t lived in doesn’t look like anything real.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:40 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]


Street view.
posted by phooky at 1:52 PM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]


Inside St. Peter's, Rome. M.C. Escher
posted by clavdivs at 2:15 PM on January 20, 2022


The absence of surreality in that Escher is surreal.
posted by fairmettle at 11:13 PM on January 20, 2022


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