A couple of projects have come to my attention lately that underscore the role digitization and virtual reality will have in making collections of all kinds available to scholars, students and the public.
Ancient Rome is rebuilt digitally - Yahoo! News with a link to Rome Reborn 1.0 is one and the article from associated press, Virtual Tours offer trips through time with links to other projects is another.
If you are wondering why you might bother with Second Life, I think this should give at least a partial answer. I think this could lead to an interesting integration of collections of artifacts that will be digitized not just in the traditional sense of creating an image, but actually rendered in a 3-d virtual sense that would allow them to be embedded in virtual world simulations and manipulated as objects in the virtual space.
Thoughts?
2 comments:
Perhaps you are more savvy than I -- could one take this rendering of Rome, and plug it into a Sim of some sort to create a role-playing game for instructing history?
Are there templates that would make this easier to implement?
I'm thinking not so much of the entire Rome sim itself so much as all the artifacts housed in museums and collections that are now being digitized to various degrees. What does digitizing an artifact really mean? It can be more than a vrml image reproduction. At this point, I'm speculating, but these kinds of uses of virtualization and 3-d modeling are just in their infancy. So, yes, what you are suggesting seems almost inevitable to me, and not in the far distant future either.
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