A Roman street at the Time of Constantine: Interactive Visit with Access to Ancient Source Materials

Philippe Fleury (1, 2) , Sophie Madeleine (1, 2) , Nicolas Lefèvre (2)

1 ERLIS - Equipe de recherche sur les littératures, les imaginaires et les sociétés
2 UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie

The virtual model of ancient Rome created in Caen (France) is at first a digital model built from the available textual, archaeological and iconographic sources. It is then a model as realistic as possible. It is finally a model with which are associated the sources which were used to create it. The objective of the team is to contribute to the scholarly knowledge of a city that marked the Western world in an indelible way by its architecture and its technology. To be scientific, an image of reconstruction must inform the user about the various degrees of reliability of the reconstruction of the objects. But to be able to correspond to a widened spectre of uses (scientific, educational and aesthetic perspectives), the image of reconstruction takes its sense only if it is complete. The graphic solutions which consist in loading the representation itself with critical elements (different colours, grey tints, dotted lines, only lines for the parts badly or not informed) are neither sufficient generally for a scientific exploitation, nor usable for an educational purpose, nor even beautiful. To resolve this paradox, the interactive model of ancient Rome created in Caen uses a possibility offered by multimedia technologies which consists in connecting metadata to the file of reconstruction itself. The direct access to the documentation from the model allows us to use the digital model as a new form of scientific publication: the link to sources and to various hypotheses replaces footnotes or the critical apparatus in a printed book. Thus, virtual reality is a real tool of representation accessible to several publics: whereas the specialist sees an hypothesis of justified reconstruction, the non-specialist finds simply the display of a reality which he has difficulty in imagining by a textual description, plan or 2D reconstruction drawing alone. This paper will focus on a particular example: a Roman street in its condition as of the 4th century A.D.

Mots clés: Augmented reality; Roman architecture; Reconstruction; Vitruvius; Virtual reality; Archaeology; Ancient history; Classics; Classical studies; Ancient Rome

Mots clés: Patrimoine culturel; Temps réel; Maquette; Humanités numériques; Simulation; Architecture; Urbanisme; Topographie; Réalité augmentée; Reconstitution; Restitution; Virtuel; Histoire romaine; Réalité virtuelle; 3D; Vitruve; Rome; Rome antique; Lettres classiques; Histoire ancienne; Archéologie

Mots clés: Roma

Domaines: Etudes classiques

Philippe Fleury, Sophie Madeleine, Nicolas Lefèvre. A Roman street at the Time of Constantine: Interactive Visit with Access to Ancient Source Materials. 41st Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Mar 2013, Perth, Australia. pp.401-407, ⟨10.5117/9789089647153⟩. ⟨hal-01596410⟩