Computer Graphics World

December 2008 24 ■ ■ ■ ■ Virtual Architecture ages 10,000 polygons; the lower-resolution imagery, meanwhile, contains approximately 400 polygons with baked-in textures. After the Rome building designs had been specifi ed in CityEngine, generating and ex- porting the entire 60 million-polygon city model took less than two hours using PCs equipped with the latest Nvidia Quadro graphics cards. " us, Rome actually was built in one day…or at least this portion of its digital counterpart was," Mueller says. An alpha release of Rome Reborn 2, constructed with the Procedural software, was presented at SIGGRAPH 2008. Due to time restrictions, Mueller was only able to create variations of apartment buildings throughout the model. Currently, Team Rome is editing the information, inserting bakeries, single-family houses, and other structures into the landscape. e high points in Rome Reborn 2 are indeed those unique struc- tures, including the gladia- tor training camp and the Colosseum, and in front of that, the 100-foot-tall bronze statue of the sun god. Other points of inter- est are the Arch of Constan- tine and the Circus Maxi- mus, the great racetrack of Rome that seated 250,000 to 300,000 spectators. History Continues "We have realized the centuries-old dream of reconstructing the great- est and most powerful city of the ancient world. e result is an invaluable resource for education, re- search, and tourism," says Frischer, who estimates that more than 60 people contributed to the project throughout the years. But Rome Reborn is just the beginning. "Great cultural heritage sites— such as Colonial Williamsburg, Giza, and the Sacred Valley in Peru, to mention a few—are next on our agenda," he adds. Another of Frischer's goals is to illustrate the entire urban development of Rome from 1000 BC to 550 AD. is would involve the establishment of an interactive, online, peer-reviewed journal for which scholars outside the project could contrib- ute 3D models of buildings spanning the entire 1500-year history of ancient Rome. e journal, to be called SAVE (Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments), "is something we are developing as the world's fi rst outlet for digital archaeologists, to which they can publish their real-time digital models in 3D, along with related documentation and monographs," Frisch- er says. " at's something that's never been done. Before, scholars could only publish 2D views of their models in print, often in black and white." Before this can be done, however, a commercial partner is needed. Frischer hopes to fi nd one soon and initiate the journal in 2009 or early 2010. is type of journal needs to support many simultaneous log-ins in a secure format that doesn't allow downloads. Key to this is the RealityServer from Mental Images (owned by Nvidia). e team worked closely with Mental Images to achieve secure remote rendering of the model, thereby protecting the intellectual property of the imagery; the model itself remains on the server, with vid- eo streaming to the user's PC instead. "Men- tal Images adapted its RealityServer software to meet this challenge of simultaneously protecting the IP of the model while allow- ing the end user to have arbitrarily high-res renderings," explains Frischer. e group also worked closely with Google Earth to tie the model's documentation to real points on earth and to connect the virtu- al space with the real space. And last month, Google Earth opened the ancient virtual Rome site to its 400 million users, allowing them to explore the city and pull up details concerning nearly 250 of the buildings. In another application, a production company has licensed Rome Reborn, which remains the property of UCLA, for an im- mersive 3D edu-tainment experience called "Rewind Rome." e attraction, part of a themed adventure in Rome, introduces visi- tors to the era though characters and a plot that unfolds within the ancient cityscape. "It is an educational approach presented in an entertaining way," says Frischer about the at- traction that opened last month. Rome Reborn also has been licensed by Past4Ward, an Atlanta-based start-up that is developing an immersive learning plat- form that will provide middle school and high school teachers with new ways to in- terest, excite, and educate students through single- and multi-player interactive, 3D environments that include gameplay. Ac- cording to Past4Ward, it is planning to Top shows a glimpse of some Class 2 structures in Rome Reborn 1.0; bottom is the same scene in Rome Reborn 2.0.

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