BY MEG SULLIVAN
UCLA Today
Archaeologists believe that the Inca marked
the summer solstice by watching the sun move through a series
of astronomical markers along the shores of Lake Titicaca between
Peru and Bolivia. But this ritual is hard to envision centuries
later because the site lies in ruins.
Santiago de Compostela, a medieval cathedral in northwestern
Spain, was once a popular destination for religious pilgrims.
Yet today, little is left of its ancient architecture that suggests
its allure.
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A section of
the Roman Forum as re-created over a period of three years
by scholars and students in UCLA’s Cultural Virtual
Reality Lab |
And how can one experience
the richness of the Roman Forum at its apex when only two of
its 22 structures have survived intact?
A team of UCLA scholars and students has figured
out how to reclaim from antiquity such lost treasures and restore
them to their former glory by harnessing the power of virtual
reality. The team is breathing new life into the crumbled remains
of such structures as the Inca Temple of the Sun, Santiago de
Compostela, the Roman Forum and more than a dozen other cultural
heritage sites around the globe.
Using flight visualization technologies, 3-D
imaging software and the same kind of digital magic used by
movie studios, UCLA’s Cultural Virtual Reality Lab (CVRLab)
has created large-scale digital models that allow viewers to
“walk” through monuments that today lie in ruins,
have eroded beyond recognition or have disappeared altogether.
Their 3-D creations are much more than colorless,
flat architectural sketches. Time travelers can experience such
telling details as the play of light across long-vanished surfaces
and the haunting echo of speeches and songs in halls that no
longer exist. The experience is especially vivid when the models
are shown in UCLA’s Visualization Portal, a state-of-the-art
screening facility built by Academic Technology Services for
campus researchers. With a floor-to-ceiling spherical screen
and an immersive virtual reality display, the portal produces
an effect similar to IMAX movies with one key exception: Viewers
actually can pick their own course of exploration.
“This is a kind of cultural time machine
that explores the prime real estate of human history,”
said Bernard Frischer, a professor of classics and the lab’s
founder.
Last month, the lab unveiled its most ambitious
project to date, a re-creation of 22 buildings and monuments
in the Roman Forum. Three years in the making, the Virtual Forum
is based on the most up-to-date research of the most studied
archaeological site in history.
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The Armenian
Church of the Redeemer, which stood in the Armenian capital
of Ani at the turn of the first millennium.
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Viewers can explore the temple site where Julius
Caesar’s corpse was cremated, the senate chambers where
the chief apologist for Rome’s pagan state religion delivered
what’s been called “perhaps the noblest defense
of a dying creed that has ever been made” and a monument
marking the point of convergence of all major roads leading
out of ancient Rome.
“This is by far the most complex digital
model that has ever been created of an archaeological site,”
said Frischer.
Along with an earlier reconstruction of the
Roman Colosseum, the Virtual Forum is the centerpiece of Rome
Reborn, a long-term project to re-create digitally thousands
of structures from early fifth-century Rome.
“Soon we will be able to give people the
experience of walking down the streets of an actual city as
opposed to hopping around from isolated spot to isolated spot,”
Frischer said. That goal came closer to reality last month when
the lab received $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Meanwhile, a new $250,000 grant from the National Science Foun-dation
will allow the CVRLab to beef up its Web site.
Each model represents a synthesis of the most
advanced research done on any given site. To create the Virtual
Forum, the team layered three maps of architectural remains
going back to 700 B.C. The model for each building was based
on the most widely accepted two-dimensional plan. Typically,
the plans represent years — sometimes decades —
of research by leading scholars. When details were lacking in
one plan, modelers turned to competing plans, or they filled
in the gaps with hypothetical segments based on comparable structures.
“We keep very careful notes so if there’s
an excavation that unearths new data, we can make adjustments,”
said Diane Favro, an architectural historian and the lab’s
co-director.
The final step is an evaluation by independent
scholars who have conducted research at the site. “They
sign off, saying, ‘This is as accurate as it can be, given
the knowledge we have today,’” Favro said. Still,
the models are never 100% complete. “You can always add
more as more information or new technology becomes available,”
Favro said.
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The Beaumaris
Castle in Wales, U.K., the last and largest of the castles
built by King Edward I. |
Other completed projects include a villa in
Pompeii, a medieval Armenian church in Turkey, one of Rome’s
first Christian churches, England’s Beaumaris Castle and
a 3,000-year-old horse stable that may have belonged to King
Solomon.
The lab is poised to model Bolivia’s Temple
of the Sun and the Grand View Garden, a fictional garden prominently
featured in the beloved 18th-century Chinese novel “A
Dream of Red Mansions.” The Titicaca model will be based
on research by Charles Stanish, director of UCLA’s Cotsen
Institute of Ar-chaeology, while the Chinese model will use
the research of Richard E. Strassberg, a professor of East Asian
languages and cultures.
“The whole experiential aspect of architecture
is something that hasn’t been taught or researched in
as great a depth as it deserves because there hasn’t been
a tool — until now,” Favro said.
John Dagenais, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese,
conceived of a virtual Santiago de Compostela as a teaching
aid for a course on medieval literature inspired by the pilgrim
route.
“I wanted my students to have a sense
of that culminating moment when religious pilgrims first entered
the cathedral after months of travel,” Dagenais said.
The model inspired undergraduates to conduct their own original
research. While in a summer-abroad program in Spain, they gathered
photographs and detailed notes on sections of the cathedral.
Back in Westwood, graduate students in architecture are feeding
the information into the model.
The digital models themselves have become invaluable
tools for research. Because 3-D software can take into account
building materials and the laws of physics, scholars can examine
construction techniques in ways sometimes overlooked when they
are working with drawings.
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| Santiago
de Compostela, a medieval cathedral in
northwestern Spain, one of the great
pilgrimage basilicas of Europe, as it appeared in the
13th century. Virtual images such as these serve both
as visual records and innovative approaches to studying
historical sites in greater detail.
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For example, one doctoral student challenged
conventional wisdom about the Colosseum, long regarded as a
masterpiece of circulation because people could supposedly enter
and find their seats in as little as 10 minutes. But while digitally
reconstructing the arena, graduate student Dean Abernathy discovered
bottlenecks that would have stalled visitors in the upper sections
for lengthy periods, suggesting a two-tier circulation system
that favored affluent patrons in the choice, lower seats.
Scholars can also use the models to study the
effects of light, sound and other transitory conditions. Using
models of the Temple of the Sun and a gigantic Egyptian obelisk
that reputedly served as a sundial in Roman times, scholars
want to track the probable path of the sun.
Recently installed software now makes it possible
to hear how medieval music would have resonated in Santiago
de Compostela.
“We don’t have the sound of pilgrims’
footsteps yet,” said Dagenais, “but we’re
working on them.”
See the wonders re-created in the lab at www.cvrlab.org.
