14 DAY TRIAL // Do you feel like visiting ancient Roman vestiges or the Egyptian pyramids? Or maybe you already have, but the thousand-year-old remnants failed to impress you like the originals would have?
The experience of walking through the original Roman Colosseum or the Egyptian pyramids is unfortunately not available in real life.
No problem, a new initiative of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Warwick Manufacturing Group and the new Warwick Digital Laboratory, University of Warwick could enhance the touristic experience by offering a realistic 3-D virtual tour of the heritage sites the way they looked in their days of glory.
A group of computer scientists and cultural heritage researchers are combining today's increasingly sophisticated 3-d computer technology with the most recent historical evidence to produce significantly improved visual reconstructions of churches, palaces and other ancient sites.
"We're trying to produce images that show more realistically the actual conditions of the time we're looking back at," says Professor Alan Chalmers, who is leading the project. "Achieving this involves taking up-to-date historical evidence and combining it with the very latest in 3-d computer technology."
"The future might see the combining of extremely accurate, high-fidelity 3-d representations with temperature, smell, sound and other parameters," comments Professor Chalmers. "Our work may lead to a significant new tool that could help put us in closer touch with the past."
The improvements of the 3-D environment will be immediately visible, as for the first time the scientists can very accurately model the effects of smoke, dust, fog and interior lighting conditions, all of which would have impacted on the way that buildings were experienced by contemporaries.
New images will be available, many times brighter, more colorful and incorporating better contrast between light and dark than those previously achievable, to produce much more realistic virtual tours.
Unfortunately, the virtual tours will not be able to simulate the sun tan you get while crossing the Egyptian desert, or the feeling of the breeze on a Greek island, but they will be more accessible to tourist who don't have the time or the money to take real trips to the ancient sites.
