Rome Reborn

Available

 * http://romereborn.frischerconsulting.com/ (now redirects to commercial site)
 * http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/ (dead link)
 * http://earth.google.com/rome/ (dead link)

People

 * Project Director: Bernard Frischer, founder of Flyover Zone, Inc.
 * Assistant Project Director: Alberto Prieto
 * Director of 3D Modeling: Lasha Tskhondia
 * Director of Historical Art: Mohamed Abdelaziz
 * Director of Technical Art: Devin Good
 * Director of Technology: Jeremiah Stevens, CTO of Flyover Zone, Inc.
 * Director of Administration: Nathanael Tavares, CEO of Flyover Zone, Inc.

Description
In September of 1974, when Bernard Frischer was newly arrived as the Prix de Rome Fellow in Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome, he was taken on a field trip to the Museum of Roman Civilization in EUR/Rome. There he saw the physical model of ancient Rome created under the direction of Italo Gismondi from the 1930s to the 1970s. Frischer immediately had the idea of finding a technological solution that could use the Gismondi model to create the illusion of walking down the streets of the ancient city. In the period 1974 to 1996 he explored various possible solutions (including, e.g., a videodisc on the model of the Aspen Movie Map), and he published a paper in 1988 describing what he at that time called "Project Cicero," which subsequently was renamed Rome Reborn. The key elements of Project Cicero were a digital recreation of ancient Rome derived from the physical model of Gismondi and the use of AI-infused avatars playing the role of Romans who could illustrate and explain to users various aspects of Roman life. The idea was to create an educational application that could make the study of ancient Rome and its culture more readily comprehensible and engaging to young students.

With the help of colleagues at UCLA, notably Architecture Professor Diane Favro, Frischer started Rome Reborn on December 1, 1996 at a conference held at the American Academy in Rome. It was to be an international initiative whose goal is the creation of 3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1000 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550). Following the advice of the project's scientific advisory committee, the project team decided that 320 CE was the best moment in time to begin the work of modeling. At that time, Rome had reached the peak of its population, and major Christian churches were just beginning to be built. After this date, few new civic buildings were built. Much of what survives of the ancient city dates to this period, making reconstruction less speculative than it must by necessity be for earlier phases.

From the beginning, Project Director Frischer divided the archaeological data to be modeled into two classes. Class I elements are those features of the city whose exact location, phasing, design, function, and name are well known and studied. Consisting of an estimated 250 features, examples include the Colosseum and Pantheon. Class II elements are all the other features that are known with a greater or lesser degree of certainty. Examples of the latter include the many apartment buildings of the city, very few of which have left behind any trace visible today in Rome. The best source for Class II are the two late-antique Regionary Catalogues, which give the building stock of the city region by region. By following the indications of the Regionary Catalogues, an urban model of late-antique Rome can be quantitatively accurate, but--apart from the Class I elements--it cannot be accurate in detail.

The urban model (version 1.0) was first developed at Frischer's laboratory at UCLA, where he was a professor in the Department of Classics from 1974 to 2004. Version 1.0, owned entirely by the Regents of the University of California, was launched by Frischer and Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni at a press conference in 2007. The Class II elements were 3D scan models derived from the great phyiscal model of ancient Rome created from the 1930s to the 1970s under the direction of Italo Gismondi. The complex scanning project was led by Prof. Gabriele Guidi, at the time a Professor of Reverse Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano (since 2022 he has been a Professor of Informatics in the Luddy School of Indiana University). The Class I elements were modeled by hand using Multigen Creator software. They included the Basilica of Maxentius, Colosseum, Ludus Magnus, Roman Forum, and Septizodium. Frischer raised all the funds used to create version 1.0 from industry sources (including Intel and Microsoft), philanthropists, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. (Despite several attempts, Frischer never succeeded in obtaining support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.) All students and faculty who worked on the project through Frischer's Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory at UCLA were paid for their work, and outside expert consultants were also compensated with honoraria.

It turned out that the idea of using scan models for the Class II elements was flawed: the Gismondi model was built at a scale of 1:250. When scaled up to 1:1, as required by the project's aims, all its defects could be seen. Walls that should have been smooth were pocked with holes or disfigured with bumps. Lines that ought to have been straight were jagged. The time and money it would have taken to remedy all these flaws was so great that Director Frischer decided to discard all the scan data deriving from the Gismondi model and to find a different solution. He had learned about the work of doctoral student Pascal Mueller, who was writing a dissertation at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich on the topic of procedural city modeling. Frischer contacted Mueller, who quickly agreed to apply his software solution, the CityEngine, to the problem of Rome Reborn's Class II features. The result was presented in August 2008 at SIGGRAPH, where Rome Reborn was the featured project and given a booth 110' x 30' in size at the entrance to a hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center. By this time, Frischer had founded a company (Frischer Consulting, Inc.) that took over responsibility for developing and financing Rome Reborn. The new Class II features were owned by the company, which also licensed the Class I features from the Regents of the University of California.

Starting in 2009, the company set about replacing all the Regents' intellectual property with new 3D models of the same Class I monuments. It also started to add many more of the ca. 250 features belonging to Class I. The primary motivation in doing so was to move away from the FLT format of MultiGen Creator and to take advantage of all the affordances developed for OBJ. This meant that the Class I features could be presented with a higher degree of photorealism and could be more flexibly migrated from one scope of application to another. Frischer Consulting, therefore, did not renew its license agreement with the Regents and by 2018 owned all the intellectual property used in the Rome Reborn model. Version 3.0 was released that year. It was used for one of Frischer Consulting's first publications of virtual tourism called "Rome Reborn: Flight over Ancient Rome." This product was at first supported only on the virtual reality headsets of Oculus and HTC Vive. Soon, support for personal computers and mobile devices was added.

Version 3.0 of the city model left much to be desired in the degree of photorealism it supported. For a variety of technical reasons, the CityEngine models had to be displayed in their lowest level of detail (LOD). Meanwhile, the Class I elements were not presented using all the latest lighting features supported by software packages such as 3D Studio Max and Maya. So, Director Frischer decided to start work on Rome Reborn 4.0 through a successor company he founded in 2022 called Flyover Zone. Version 4.0 was released in November 2023. It marks a dramatic step forward in terms of photorealism of the Class I and II elements (now displayed in their highest LOD), and it also represents a quantitative advance in the number of Class I elements of the city that are incorporated with detailed hand modeling. These now include the following:

Aqua Claudia, Ara Pacis, Arch of Constantine, Arch of Septimius Severus, Arch of Titus, Atrium Vestae, Aurelian Wall and gates, Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, Basilica Neptuni, Baths of Agrippa, Baths of Caracalla (including interiors and sculptural decoration), Baths of Constantine, Baths of Decius, Baths of Diocletian, Baths of Nero, Baths of Titus, Baths of Trajan, Capitoline Hill (complete), Circus Flaminius, Circus of Gaius and Nero (late-antique phase), Circus Maximus, Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum), Imperial fora, Imperial palaces, Ludus Magnus, Mausoleum of Augustus, Mausoleum of Hadrian, Montecitorio Obelisk, Naumachia of Trajan, Nymphaeum Alexandri, Odeon of Domitian, Pantheon (including interior and sculptural decoration), Porta Praenestina, Porticus Liviae, Pyramid of Cestius, Roman Forum (including the interiors of the Basilica Aemilia, Basilica Julia, and Curia Julia), Septizodium, Stadium of Domitian, Temple of Diana on the Aventine, Temple of Claudius on the Caelian, Temple of Hadrian in the Campus Martius, Temple of Matidia in the Campus Martius, Temple of Minerva on the Aventine, Temple of Serapis on the Quirinal, Temple of the Sun in the Campus Agrippae, Temple of Venus and Rome, Templum Divorum, Theater of Balbus, Theater of Marcellus, Tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces.

With the publication of version 4.0, Director Frischer stated that the project had reached its initial goal making the Rome Reborn model ready for deployment in teaching. Flyover Zone has already published educational virtual tours of the Basilica of Maxentius, Baths of Caracalla, Pantheon, Roman Forum, and a Flight over Ancient Rome. More tours of individual sites are planned for release in 2024 and beyond. As illustrated by several of Frischer's own publications, the urban visualization also has potential to support new empirical (or what Frischer calls "simpirical") research in which the Rome Reborn model makes it possible for scholars to make observations and run experiments that would otherwise be impossible short of true time travel.