Vitrual Theater District of Pompeii

The original Pompeii Project at Carnegie Mellon's Studio for Creative Inquiry in 1995/96 built an interactive virtual model of the Theater District of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. It was very advanced for its day. Much later, PublicVR sponsored conversion of the original model to VRML format and made some improvements to the artwork. The Virtual Theater District is currently on a four-museum tour, as part of a larger exhibit called "a day in Pompeii." Details of that project and access to the models are available at http://artscool.cfa.cmu.edu:16080/~hemef/pompeii/project.html We will call the VRML version "Theater District 2.0", with the 95/96 model being 1.0

Version 3.0 of the Theater District Model (20 meg file) shows a more complete and accurate model of the grand Theatre and the triangle forum. You can see it in UT2004, or you can see the screenshots.

PublicVR is now hosting an effort to rebuild the Virtual Theater District (version 4.0) at a much higher degree of historical accuracy. We expect to release the first part of the new Pompeii in early 2009. The image at the top of this page is from the new model.

Credits

Anne Weis, Ph.D. is leading our efforts at historical accuracy for the Pompeii Theater District project 4.0. Michael Darnell did all the modeling with some editing help from Dennis Loubet. Andrew Twigg is designing the new website, and Susan Tucker is doing the website database programming. Jeffrey Jacobson sets the technical and overall specifications for the project, managing it, mediating all technical issues, and maintaining libraries of project information.

Theater District 3.0 is actually an intermediate model produced by the 4.0 project, with some additional edits and wrapped up by Robert Bruskill.

The credits for Theater District 2.0 is very long, and contained within its own website.