![]() Singapore-based Hiverlab has ambitions to digitize heritage sites across the world. Lithodomos is not the only company working on historical VR. He also hopes to partner with museums and universities to create other historical VR experiences, such as allowing museum-goers to view artifacts up close and in 360 degrees. Young sees his software being used by tour groups who would provide their guests with headsets, or by individuals using cheap, portable viewers like Google Cardboard. Young plans to work on scenes from Delphi, Spain and the UK in the near future. The scenes are available on two Lithodomos apps released in December and January. It’s also recreated the Odeon of Agrippa, a concert hall in the center of the Athenian agora, and parts of ancient Jerusalem. In addition to the Temple of Venus and Rome, Lithodomos has a recreation of the Arènes de Lutèce, a Roman amphitheater and stage from the beginning of the 2nd century AD, now just fragments tucked away behind apartment buildings in Paris’s Latin Quarter. But in the VR world, the sky is a hazy blue, the perimeter of the temple lined with trees. It might be raining outside, or nighttime. The app maps your physical location onto the temple, allowing you to look around from various angles. The temple before you is whole again, its vanished columns standing tall, its façade all shining white marble, the intricate relief sculptures of its pediment cast in shadow by the summer sun. But put on a virtual reality headset with Lithodomos’ app, and suddenly it’s a June afternoon in the 1 st century AD. Today, Rome’s Temple of Venus and Rome lies split in half, most of its columns gone, ravaged by centuries of fire, earthquakes and pillaging. “It really helps you to place yourself back in time.” None “It’s 360-degree 3D virtual reality,” Young says. The recreations can be used on site with a smartphone headset, or from home or school using a commercial VR system like Oculus Rift. His company, Lithodomos VR, creates immersive virtual recreations of iconic ruins. Young would like to show those people what Rome looked like nearly 2,000 years ago by fitting them with virtual reality headsets. “It’s low season at the moment in Italy, but there are still hundreds and thousands of people wandering in the streets and looking at ruins,” he says. When I catch up with Australian archaeologist Simon Young, he’s in Rome. It may even be a game changer for the ways we visit ancient cities like Jerusalem or Paris. Thanks to virtual reality, seeing ruins as they looked in their heyday is becoming possible. The full article goes into much more detail, and it’s well worth reading.Have you ever stood in front of historic ruins-the Parthenon, say, or one of Britain’s many ancient castles-and closed your eyes, imagining what the scene before you would have looked like centuries ago? Google’s models tend to look a little better than the ones in Virtual Earth, but the quantity and load time make VE’s cities look much better. Google Earth, on the other hand, can only load full-res models. They’ll load 3D models very quickly and very low-res, then slowly sharpen them up as you zoom in on them. In fact, this is one of my favorite things about Virtual Earth. Since the Vexcel acquisition, this aerial imagery is increasingly being captured using the Vexcel UltraCAM series of high-resolution digital cameras, providing Virtual Earth’s 3D display with sub-meter accuracy.Īlong with being able to generate massive numbers of models per city, they’re also able to load quickly for each user. The models and their texturing are generated from aerial imagery generally captured at a 15 cm ground sample distance (GSD) by planes flying at roughly 5,500 feet over the target city and capturing a minimum of 5 views for each building (top and 4 sides). Microsoft’s acquisition of Vexcel Corporation, a 20-year old provider of remote sensing solutions, provided the Virtual Earth team with a broad background in photogrammetry, geospatial data production, and digital elevation model (DEM) generation and refinement. The Virtual Earth 3D blog has a post today that explains in detail how they create each 3D city.
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