Visualizing History

January 31, 2016 11:37 AM

Syracuse, ancient and late classical era. Pompeii's Last Day. Hadrian's Villa: reconstruction and current state and virtual walkthrough. Virtual exploration of Corinth, 2nd century C.E. Rome circa 320 C.E. Flyby of Tenochtitlan. A 3-D walkthrough of Paris in the 18th century. Paris in 1896 and today. London in 1927 and 2013, side by side. A portal into 1924 London through 2014.

For more 3D visualizations of history, see the IDIA Lab website and the YouTube channel of the Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies.

posted by rednikki (10 comments total)

Oooh, wonderful visualizations. I had to keep a tab open to Wikipedia while looking at the Rome 320 AD one. A lot of the landmarks are still standing, in different states of completeness, of course. I've spent days walking around Rome on two occasions and it's very interesting to get a sense of how it looked in antiquity.
posted by Harald74 at 12:02 PM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

I did some of my best work in ancient Syracuse...
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:11 PM on January 31, 2016

"Salve, citizen...say, do you hear something rumbling?"
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:00 PM on January 31, 2016

This post, particularly the comparison videos, makes me think of the science fiction novel The Light of Other Days wherein in the near future a technology is invented that allows a camera view to be captured from any place on Earth at any point in history.
posted by XMLicious at 1:24 PM on January 31, 2016 [4 favorites]

Oh thank YOU for a post about Syracuse that does not contain basketball.

Love these. Pompeii has always been a minor obsession.
posted by kinnakeet at 1:32 PM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

In the Pompei video, the destruction wrought to the works of the human hands by the YouTube compression algorithm is painful at times.
posted by hat_eater at 2:35 PM on January 31, 2016

these videos are pretty cool, but the world REALLY needs an education version of Assassin's Creed
posted by rebent at 4:59 PM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

Vesuvius pre-meltdown was pointier.
posted by BWA at 5:30 PM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

I confess to being a trifle annoyed by the classical ones (endless slow pans over apparently random collections of white buildings on white streets—why is everything white? the ancients loved color—with pompous music playing and except for Rome with no indication of what you're looking at), but the Paris one is wonderful and well worth eight minutes of your time. Of course, it helps if you have a collection of 18th- and early-19th-century maps (I spent a fair amount of time and money having things xeroxed at the Map Room of the NYPL, back in the day), but they show you a little map onscreen every now and then. Anyway, it's a superb recreation, and I want a Google Historic Street View that will let you wander at will all through the city, dammit.
posted by languagehat at 5:47 PM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

I love these. There's also a great one of 17th century London created by a team of students for a competition run by the British Library, using historic maps and protected buildings' records (fly-through starts at 0.50).
posted by freya_lamb at 3:33 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]