The Digital Hadrian’s Villa Project: Virtual World Technology as an Aid to Finding Alignments between Built and Celestial Features
Virtual World Technology as an Aid to Finding Alignments between
Built and Celestial Features
Bernard Frischer1
John Fillwalk2
1Director, Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, University of Virginia
2Director, IDIA Lab, Ball State University
Hadrian’s Villa is the best known and best preserved of the imperial villas built in the hinterland of Rome by emperors such as Nero, Domitian, and Trajan during the first and second centuries CE. A World Heritage site, Hadrian's Villa covers at least 120 hectares and consists of ca. 30 major building complexes. From 2006 to 20011, with the generous support of the National Science Foundation[1] and a private sponsor, the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory created a 3D restoration model of the entire site authored in 3DS Max. From January to April 2012, Ball State’s IDIA Lab converted the 3D model to Unity 3D, a virtual world (VW) platform, so that it could be explored interactively, be populated by avatars of members of the imperial court, and could be published on the Internet along with a related 2D website that presents the documentation undergirding the 3D model. This paper will discuss the instructional and research goals of the project and present some of the preliminary results.