Research
Visualizing History: Modeling in the Eternal City
RomeLab simultaneously pushes boundaries of argumentation and technology. Informed by theoretical work in critical cartography and information visualization, rather than Beaux-Arts tradition of reconstruction, the visualizations created in RomeLab serve as digital laboratories.
Procedural Modeling Techniques
The current iteration of RomeLab is heavily invested in procedural modeling techniques rather than more traditional, CAD/CAM, 'hand-built' digital modeling. The underlying goal is the rapid and iterative generation of three-dimensional city prototypes to be used for experimentation and argumentation.
Humanities Virtual World Consortium
The RomeLab project operates under the aegis of the Humanities Virtual World Consortium, an international project funded by the Mellon Foundation.
humvw.org: the CMS
The content management system of RomeLab is built on a prototype Drupal CMS core. The front end to the back end handles RomeLab's data management needs.
CityEngine and Metadata
At the heart of the project is a data driven effort to document source material and convey it through interactive three-dimensional interfaces. Following the analogy of text-based critical edition, RomeLab created three critical editions of the spaces it studies, one for the Forum of 210 BCE, one for the Forum of 160 BCE, and one for the Forum of 44 BCE.
RomeLab: Forum 210 BCE >>
RomeLab: Forum 160 BCE >>
RomeLab: Forum 44 BCE >>