Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1593
December 2008 25 Virtual Architecture ■ ■ ■ ■ make its Rome Reborn license available to computer-game developers. Building Blocks of the Future Indeed, everyone knows that the use of cutting-edge CG helped re-create much of the ancient backdrop in the Oscar-win- ning fi lm Gladiator. Now, just a few years later, academics and scholars have re-cre- ated a digital, authentic rendition of an- cient Rome for both entertainment and educational purposes. "Here, we are using CG to create a new form of scholarly com- munication; we are not just making pretty Hollywood models," says Frischer, now a professor at the University of Virginia, where for the past few years he has headed up the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities. So, after a decades-long journey, Frischer fi nally is on the verge of conquering the ancient Rome of his dreams. e project's point of departure was Frischer's experience in seeing early exhibitions of 3D graph- ics applied to cultural heritage in the early 1990s. e results were technologically impressive but always lacking in scholarly credibility. Today, Rome Reborn 2 has rev- olutionized CG technology and unearthed new approaches for exhibiting historical fi ndings in museums and classrooms, and on the Internet; it also illustrates the im- pact CG is having on other fi elds, such as archaeology and the humanities. "I hope that Rome Reborn will encour- age new partnerships between academia and industry, and between subject experts, end users, and technologists. To achieve monumental results, we need large-scale collaborative teams, and through such teams, we can promote CG and human- istic research, and bring the humanities into the era of Big Science." ■ Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics World. 3D modeling MultiGen Creator Autodesk 3ds Max Procedural modeling Side Effects Houdini Procedural CityEngine Laser scanning, modeling InnovMetric Polyworks Rendering Autodesk Lightscape Chaos Group V-Ray Remote rendering Mental Images RealityServer File-format transfer Okino PolyTrans Scene building Open Scene Graph (open source) Geo-referencing user interface Google Earth