Visit the Ancient Rome in VR with Rome Reborn

Do you have a passion for ancient history and virtual reality? Then Rome Reborn is for sure a project you should look into.

Rome Reborn is an amazing project that goes on since 22 years ago (yikes!) with the purpose of creating a digital reconstruction of ancient Rome. Lately, this incredible work has been ported to virtual reality and so you are able to live the ancient Rome as if you were there.

I have been able to interview professor Bernard Frischer, the man that is following this project with great passion since the beginning. We got in touch various months ago and in the end, I managed to have an interview with him to let you discover how is the ancient Rome in VR. As an Italian and a VR enthusiast, I couldn’t but fall in love with Rome Reborn.

Before starting with the interview, a little disclaimer: my consultancy agency New Technology Walkers is collaborating with prof. Frischer for what concerns some aspects of the marketing of Rome Reborn, and that’s why I am not writing a review of it (you may think it is biased). The idea of interviewing prof. Frischer came before the collaboration was set, because as an Italian, I am proud of a VR project that tells the story of the glorious ancient Rome. So this is NOT a sponsored post.

Clarified this, let’s start with this long and detailed interview! I can assure you that you will find some very interesting gems in it… for instance did you know that Palmer Luckey himself has supported this project?

Hello, prof. Frischer. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Can you explain us what is Rome Reborn?

Did you ever wish you could travel back in time to see ancient Rome at the peak of its glory? Now you can thanks to Rome Reborn®, a series of products for personal computers and VR headsets that make it possible to visit the now-vanished ancient city. Computer reconstructions of the buildings and monuments explained to you by leading experts bring the city to life.

Rome Reborn® is aimed at the general public: the tens of millions of people from around the world who each year visit The Eternal City. If you are planning to visit Rome, you can use Rome Reborn® to prepare by taking our virtual tours so that your visit to the city is more rewarding and meaningful. If you have been to Rome, you can use our products to deepen or to refresh your knowledge. Students and teachers of Ancient History, Classical Studies, and Roman Civilization will also find Rome Reborn® an exciting new learning resource.  In terms of age, in our extensive testing of Rome Reborn® products, we have seen evidence that anyone from 6 to 96 can find Rome Reborn® engaging. 

Rome Reborn® VR is a series of apps and videos that present individual tours of the city, including, for example, the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, the imperial fora, the imperial palace, the Pantheon, and the entire city seen from the air. Think of each app or video as a chapter in a guidebook about ancient Rome. You can gauge how much you have learned by registering on our website and taking our quizzes that will give you your expert rating. When you do well on a quiz, you will earn awards which you can share with your friends on social media.  

Rome Reborn®  VR utilizes version 3.0 of the highly acclaimed 3D digital model of the ancient city created over the past twenty years by the Rome Reborn® Project, an international initiative dating to the mid 1990s whose goal is the creation of 3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the Bronze Age (ca. 1600 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550). With the advice of an international scientific advisory committee, the leaders of the project decided that A.D. 320 was the best moment in time to begin the work of modeling. At that time, Rome had reached the peak of its population, and major Christian churches were just beginning to be built. After this date, the capital of the empire left Rome for Constantinople and so few new civic buildings were built. Much of what survives of the ancient city dates to the period around A.D. 320, making reconstruction less speculative than it must unavoidably be for earlier phases.  Version 1.0 of the Rome Reborn®  model was completed in 2007, 2.0 in 2008, 2.1 in 2010, 2.2 in 2012, and 3.0 in 2018.

Over the years, millions of people have read about the project in news outlets such as Newsweek, the New York Times, Scientific American or seen short video fly-throughs of the various versions of the Rome Reborn® model. The popularity of the model also explains why the Rome Reborn® video used by Smarthistory, the “most-visited art history website in the world.”  Smarthistory’s educational documentary on Rome is the single most popular program produced by this website.  Rome Reborn®  was honored to be the featured project at SIGGRAPH 2008, where it was exhibited in a booth that was 110′ x 30′ at the entrance to the LA Convention Center. 

ow, the Rome Reborn® team is pleased to make the model publicly available using Virtual Reality headsets and personal computers (Windows and Mac). Now you can immerse yourself in the ancient city, to walk down its streets, and even to enter some of its most famous buildings while listening to the commentary of highly qualified experts.

The exclusive distributor of products for the Rome Reborn® project is Flyover Zone Productions. The company is based in Bloomington, Indiana and has the mission of creating engaging AR and VR applications about the world’s cultural heritage sites and monuments. 

Is it really true that this is a project that has born 22 years ago? If so, this is a monstrous duration! What have you done in all these years? Why has it taken so long?

Rome Reborn was launched at the first meeting of the Scientific Advisory Committee held in December 1996 at the American Academy in Rome. The longest-serving member of the committee is Prof. Paolo Liverani, who is still actively involved. I was the project director from the first and remain so until today. The actual idea of Rome Reborn occurred to me when I was a new Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and was taken in September 1974 by the Academy on a field trip to the Museum of Roman Civilization. There I saw the great physical model of ancient Rome (“Plastico di Roma Antica”) created by a team led by architect-archaeologist Italo Gismondi from the 1930s to the 1970s. I was very impressed and started to investigate what technology might be used to reproduce the model and make it more widely available to the people of the world. I gave a presentation of the first idea of a videodisc of the “Plastico” at a private conference held at Apple Computer in 1986 (my talk was published in 1998 here).

In July 2018, the project completed version 3.0 of its scientific 3D digital reconstruction of ancient Rome in the year AD 320. Why did it take so long to reach the point of completion (if, indeed, one can ever speak of “completion” of a digital project!)?

Version 1.0 was started in 1997 and completed in 2007. It based on the idea of 3D digitization of the great physical model of ancient Rome in AD 320  housed in the “Museo della Civilta’ Romana” in EUR/Rome. The digitization was accomplished in 2004 with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation by 30 days of non-stop laser scanning. You can read about the project here.

While the results of the data capture–led by Prof. Gabriele Guidi of the Politecnico di Milano–were excellent, it turned out that once you enlarged the physical model from the scale of 1:250 to that of 1:1 needed for Virtual Reality applications, all the defects of the model became visible and disturbing. While it might have been possible to edit the scan data, this was impractical in terms of time and money.  The task of cleaning up the ca. 7,000 building models making up the city simulation would have been enormous.

Version 2.0 was started in the summer of 2007. It took advantage of research underway by Pascal Mueller, a doctoral student at the ETH Zurich. Mueller developed the first software package offering “procedural city modeling,” that is, software that automatically populated a digital model of the terrain and streets of a city with buildings similar in appearance to those in the real city. For his dissertation, Mueller developed a simulation of Manhattan. We succeeded in recruiting him to apply his software to ancient Rome. The work was unveiled at SIGGRAPH 2008, where it was the featured project. Mueller subsequently founded a company called CityEngine which several years ago was purchased by ESRI, the publisher famous for its ArcGIS software. Mueller is now the head of the CityEngine department of ESRI. So we worked with Pascal to replace all the scan data from the Plastico di Roma Antica with new procedurally-generated models of the ca. 7,000 buildings of ancient Rome. The results were much more pleasing to the eye. You can read about this at this address.

The problem with version 2.0 is that it was not optimized for real-time applications such as are needed for Virtual Reality. Meanwhile, the Great Recession of 2008-2010 made it almost impossible to find new philanthropic funding. Things started to change in 2011, when the economic recovery reached the point where donors were willing to step forward once again. That was also the year in which a young student named Palmer Luckey approached us to ask if we wanted to help him realize his dream of creating a consumer kit for VR headsets that could be used to support virtual tours down the streets of Rome. We, of course, agreed to cooperate by expressing our moral support for his project, which soon had a highly successful Kickstarter campaign and then was bought out by Facebook. Knowing that consumer-level VR was going to become available very soon, we redoubled our efforts to optimize the Rome Reborn reconstruction model, helped by the very generous and constant support of a Kuwaiti businessman who loves ancient Rome. The Oculus Rift shipped in spring 2016. Rome Reborn 3.0 was well underway by then, and we had a meeting to show Palmer Luckey our work at Facebook headquarters on March 1, 2016. He was very impressed and offered us direct access to executives of Oculus, who helped us in various ways to develop our VR applications. We held many demonstrations of our first three apps in the period 2016-2018, getting the benefit of the experiences of over 500 users ranging in age from 6 to 96. By the summer of 2018, we were ready to unveil our work to the general public through the stores of Apple, Microsoft, Oculus, and Vive.

So, yes, 22 years is a long time, but there are very good reasons to explain why the gestation period of Rome Reborn took so long. 

How did you reconstruct the entire city of ancient Rome, with all its colors and details?

We divide the evidence for the topography of ancient Rome in AD 320 into two classes: Class I features are those known with certainty or high probability. We know their location, design, function, and name. Class II features are all the other urban elements of the city. They are known with less certainty.

We are fortunate in the case of Class II features in that we have two catalogs of the building stock of the city dating to our period (the fourth century AD). They catalogs give us the distribution of buildings by types (single-family houses, apartment buildings, warehouses, etc.) district (“region”) by district throughout the city. So, in the case of Class II, we can be quantitatively accurate but not accurate in terms of exact location and design.  Class I features include ca. 150 buildings and monuments. Class II includes ca. 6,850 buildings. We model Class I buildings by hand, using the same kinds of software (notably, AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max) that a contemporary architect would use to design and visualize a new building. We use procedural modeling (CityEngine of ESRI) for the Class II features.

What is the greatest lesson that you learned in these 22 years of work?

It is hard to boil everything down to a single “greatest” lesson. I would say that the best advice I could give anyone starting any difficult, monumental project would be:

• Learn how to collaborate with others. You cannot do it alone. Rome Reborn took the creative input of dozens of individuals, each bringing their own specialty to the project. Few people come to collaboration by nature or nurture. Don’t assume you know how to do it, but be willing to learn from your mistakes as you go along. Above all else, do not quit when your erstwhile collaborators disappoint or betray you!
• Learn how to recruit the right people to your creative team. It is critical that your team members have what I call “lo spirito collaborativo” [“the collaborative spirit” in Italian, AN]. Avoid the “prima donna,” however talented. Your team members must know how to communicate regularly and openly with you and with each other. They must understand that their contribution, however large, is but part of the bigger picture. They must be focused on the work, not on establishing their place in the pecking order of the team. 
• Keep strict control of the intellectual property. Do not incorporate the work of others without a license, and save copies of your licenses. If you license your own work to third parties, be sure to do so with the aid of an attorney to protect your property, and be very cautious in doing so. There are lots of unscrupulous people and businesses out there.
• Don’t even start if you are primarily motivated by making money. You may or may not earn material compensation from your work. The best and surest rewards are psychological and knowing that if you manage to complete your “monument” (however defined), you have a chance of leaving behind something that will interest people for generations to come.

When and why did you think that VR was a perfect fit for Rome Reborn?

I first encountered VR in the late 1980s. As someone teaching Roman civilization to hundreds of students at UCLA, who were studying it not because they were necessarily interested but in order to fulfill what we called a “general education” requirement, I was quite focused on how to arouse curiosity in people.

I wrote a book about how the ancient Greek philosophical school of Epicurus used a statue to arouse curiosity and thereby to recruit new members (see this link). As soon as I had my first VR experience, I could see that it would help me to achieve the “curiosity arousal” of my UCLA students, located so far in space, time, and in cultural background from ancient Rome. I was convinced that if average California undergraduates could be whisked back in time to the streets of ancient Rome, they would find it a life-changing experience. So when in the early 1990s it was common to say “VR is a solution in search of a problem,” I replied, “I know the problem: time travel. And VR is the only solution to take students on virtual time travel to ancient Rome.”

What will people learn by experiencing Rome Reborn in Virtual Reality?

I like to say that in History, the “camera” follows the actors, whether they be political leaders, military commanders, or anyone else of interest to the scholar. In Topography, the camera stays fixed in a certain place and records the life happening in that place. Topography, then, like History, is multidisciplinary. It is interested in any and all events that take place in a certain space.

So, to go from the general to the specific, Rome Reborn uses VR as a tool to make topography tangible to people of all ages and backgrounds. A “topographical” presentation of ancient Rome means not only explaining the natural and built features of the city but how the urban spaces were used by and what they signified to the ancient Romans. We like to say that “place” is “space” invested with human meaning. Rome Reborn takes the space that was ancient Rome and brings it to life for its users by showing how the ancients used their city in their daily life, in their economic and political interactions, and in their worship of the gods expressive of their personal and cultural values.

I’ve seen that the program features mostly 360 renders and not walkable environments. Why? And do you plan to change this in the future?

We publish our work to run on the “lowest common denominator” in terms of technology. At the moment, this means solutions such as the Samsung Gear VR and the Oculus GO. They do not have the computing power needed to render all the geometry and textures of our 3D reconstructions. So, instead of offering the opportunity for our users to roam freely through our virtual spaces, we fix them to a point in the middle of a 360 panorama.

Now, we think that this sacrifice is slight in terms of content, albeit great in terms of the “wow” factor of virtual presence. That is, even if we were able to offer free roaming in all our applications, the point would still be for the user to teleport from info point to info point to see and learn about a feature of interest. I daresay that if users could walk around our Roman Forum app, most would still choose to teleport from point to point: walking would take far too long and not be all that interesting. Who really seems to crave free roaming? Judging by all the demonstrations we’ve given of Rome Reborn to hundreds of people, no one who has a serious interest in what we are offering: the chance to learn about ancient Rome. Now, having said all this, we see 360 panoramas as a temporary solution. We relish the opportunity to offer free roaming whenever it can be supported by the Oculus Go and similar devices, and we’ve done so for our app presenting the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine. As the low-end VR devices inevitably become more powerful, we are confident we will be able to offer free roaming for all our apps. That is certainly our goal. Our current reliance on 360 panoramas is done in the spirit of “something is better than nothing.” 

What is the feature of Rome Reborn that you like the most?

I guess I’m always focused on the Next Great Thing. In our case, it’s multiplayer. We should be implementing it in the first half of 2019. With multi-player, several things are possible.

First, teachers can use Rome Reborn for distance learning. A logical extension of this is that archaeologists, wherever they may be, can schedule lectures online, and people can sign up and join them in the virtual spaces that the archaeologists will present and discuss. I wonder, for example, if the Archaeological Institute of American (AIA), which has a great program of sending speakers to give lectures all over N. America, would be interested in partnering with us to take advantage of this new feature so that it can offer not only old-fashioned lectures in real spaces but also lectures and guided tours set in virtual space. Imagine what a tremendous boost to their potential audience that would represent.

Another use of multi-player is to make it possible for Rome Reborn users to take full advantage of the Oculus Quest‘s support of arena-scale tracking. Now, imagine you have a high school or college gymnasium available for a class to walk around one of our apps (using free roam, of course!). With multi-player turned on, everyone can “see” where everyone else is, so they can share a big space without much risk of them bumping into each other.

I know that many people have tried Rome Reborn. What has been the feedback that you received?

I’m happy to report that the early results of product ratings are quite positive. Again, looking back at our testing over the past two years, we have literally never had a critical comment nor have we ever had a case of VR sickness. We study the analytics in the stores quite closely and are happy to see that the average time users spend in our apps is long–some apps as long as 30 minutes. And that is a per-session measurement; another analytic is return users, and here, too, it’s clear from their behavior that our users find Rome Reborn apps rewarding because they keep coming back to explore our virtual spaces in greater depth and detail. And most important of all–and a great credit to our talented programmer and CEO Nathanael Tavares–we have not had a single bug report from the stores of Apple, Microsoft, Oculus, or Steam. Given all the units we’ve sold, that is truly remarkable.

Why do you think that Rome Reborn is an example that other important archeological sites should follow?

To the extent that an archaeological site has a professional staff on site and accepts the mission of public outreach, then I would certainly recommend–and predict–that it commission development of a VR app along the lines of Rome Reborn. Doing so will spread public awareness of their site, and it will give them a way to tell their story, putting the “flesh” back onto the “bones” of the random ruins that happen to survive from what was once an important building or settlement.

What will be the future of Rome Reborn? What is your vision?

I am going to be 70 next year, so I am starting to feel a bit like Moses who after leading the people of Israel through the desert for 40 years, just managed to bring them to the Promised Land before disappearing from the scene. I find this a bit frustrating because what we see now is just a very weak version of the vision I’ve long had about where all this is inevitably leading. Virtual field trips to ancient Rome with panoramas at info points are just the first baby steps forward to where I think we’re going.

Where is that? 

What I see happening (as I already suggested at that meeting held at Apple in 1986) is that Rome Reborn will become part of a larger suite of VR applications that transform the way children learn about the past. Instead of reading about it and taking field trips to see the actual ruins of the cultural heritage sites of the past, they will use the virtual time travel afforded by VR to go back to the reconstructed places and societies they are studying.

In doing so, they will be able to interact with NPCs playing the role of cultural informants showing and explaining to them the local political institutions, economic activities, technologies, customs, beliefs, diet, family organization, and ways of life. Children will learn by doing, not by studying. This learning could quite conceivably also include language learning, so we might well see, for example, the revival of spoken Greek, Latin, and Middle Egyptian. To recall my reference to Moses, this is not as utopian a dream as it might seem if we just think of how in the twentieth century Zionists revived spoken Hebrew, which had all but disappeared from the planet. This much more engaging form of learning will feed upon itself, inspiring more bright young people to major in historical studies at university and to pursue careers in some branch of History or cultural heritage. The fact that many will be fluent in the “dead” languages of the cultures they will be studying will be an added advantage to them: imagine how much more insightful and productive will be the scholar of the year 2050 who reads Latin as fast as she reads her native English or French than are the scholars of today who stumble through their Latin at 3 to 5 pages an hour, flipping through their dictionaries and grammar books as they go. And imagine how more connected scholars will be with each other as they start to write up their results in Latin and stop using the babel of modern languages that keep one linguistic group fairly ignorant of what another is writing and thinking about the same topic.

When the children of the mid to late twenty-first century grow up and start to live in a globalized world ever more automated with more and more free time for individuals, they will return to virtual places like virtual ancient Rome and engage in the role-playing game I call “Ancient Life” (on the model of Second Life). The game will be sequenced by generations, with each generation of virtual Romans living for one year. In that year, the goal will be to improve your social and economic status and to set the stage for your children to advance even more in the succeeding iteration (or “generation,” if you will) of the game the next year. To do that, you have to learn to behave and think like a Roman, perhaps even learning to speak some Latin in the process. Users who enjoy the game can be “reincarnated” in the next year’s iteration as their own child, and this reincarnation will make it advantageous for them to have invested in their children’s future in their current phase of the game. The game can continue indefinitely, with more and more virtual Romans building out the city and engaging in the cooperative/competitive activities of production and reproduction that allow the individual player to maintain or improve her standing in the community. The Ancient Life of Rome can be interoperative with those of contemporary societies (e.g., in Egypt, Gaul, Judaea, Greece) and can eventually merge with those coming later (e.g., the medieval period and Renaissance). Meanwhile, every century (i.e., decade in real terms) the clock can be reset on the Rome game, and everything can start over from the beginning.

How can people buy Rome Reborn?

First, it is important to stress that Rome Reborn applications run on personal computers and laptops (Macintosh and Windows o/s) as well as on VR headsets.

So the apps can be purchased in the stores of Apple and Microsoft. For VR, we sell our apps in the stores of Oculus and Vive. Of course, the VR headsets are more immersive than are the flat screens of monitors, but the information is exactly the same. So far, sales for PCs and VR headsets are about equal. Of course, it doesn’t have to be “either/or.” Teachers, for example, might use the VR version in their library’s media room, advising students to purchase the same app in its Mac or Windows version for use in the dorm room or home.

Regarding pricing, we approached this with academic publishing in mind and thought that prices such as $50 per app would be considered fair. We actually used the launch price of $19.99 in July 2018 thinking that it would be a bargain. But our users complained that the price was too high, and we noticed that in the Education category of the Oculus Store, no other app cost more than $9.99. So we quickly lowered our prices to under $10. Our average full retail price is now between $1.99 and $5.99 depending on how much content is offered in an application. We measure this by adding up the length of all the audio tracks in the nodes of an app. This gives us a reasonable minimum estimate of how much content we’re offering. It varies from about 30 minutes for the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine to 3 hours for the Roman Forum. When we quote our current prices to our academic colleagues, they are pleasantly surprised at how low they are. Several have already decided to assign Rome Reborn applications to their students in the spring 2019 semester.

Anything else to add to my readers?

Rome Reborn is not only a series of applications for PCs and VR headsets; it is also an online community. We urge your readers to register in the Community and to begin to use the facilities they will find there to initiate discussions with us and with other users and to take our assessments to see how much they have learned from our apps and how their knowledge stacks up against that of other members of our growing, worldwide community. Please see: https://romereborn.org/community/

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And that’s it with this incredible interview! If you are interested in Rome Reborn, you can find all its related products at its official page. Let’s all support the culture in virtual reality!

(Header image by Flyover Zone Productions)