Making Culture Virtual: Recent 3D Modeling Projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

This talk will discuss methodologies and technologies used to digitize 3D cultural property such as pottery, statues, buildings and even entire cities. Current projects at IATH will be used as examples, including Virtual Williamsburg, the Digital Forma Urbis Project, and Rome Reborn. In the conclusion, new directions and challenges in this field will be discussed, including populating models of buildings and cities with people and their activities; using models as tools for discovery (and not simply as illustrations of previous knowledge); and the online collection and dissemination of real-time 3D models on the Internet.