Project: 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

PublicVR is now hosting an effort to rebuild the Virtual Theater District from more detailed sources, and with much greater historical accuracy. To this end, Jeffrey Jacobson and Michael Darnell of PublicVR are collaborating with Prof. Anne Weis at the Department of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. We are using UT2004 as the software platform, so it will be compatible with CaveUT. We expect to release the first part of the new Pompeii in early 2009.