Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Faculty Member Serves as Architect for Virtual Rome
Dean Abernathy, Lecturer in Architecture and also Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) served as the architect for Rome Reborn, the first digital visualization project of an ancient city. The project took ten years to complete and was headed by Bernard Frischer, director of IATH, and Diane Favro, a professor of architecture at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The project includes the digital 3-D recreation of more than 7,000 buildings in ancient Rome, and allows users to navigate among the buildings in significant detail. Several of the most important buildings’ interiors are also included. The applications of the program are varied and range from architectural and anthropological to modern-day tourism.
Abernathy came to U.Va. in 2005 from UCLA, where he helped establish the Cultural Virtual Reality Lab, one of the first centers to rigorously explore the use of digital technology in cultural site analysis, visualization, preservation and information dissemination. At the School of Architecture, Abernathy teaches classes on digital information visualization and architectural design, focusing on the use of computational tools in the processes of design and analysis.
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