A compact version of existing technology lets archaeologists and art historians revisit the past
Bernard Frischer, a classics-professor-turned-computer-geek, is striding to class at the University of Virginia on a rainy May morning. In one hand he holds a green umbrella. In the other, he clutches a bundle of computer cables. Beside him walks Shayne Brandon, a systems administrator, who totes a partially unzipped backpack exposing a keyboard and more cables. In his arms he carries a black cube no bigger than a file box.
The black cube is the engine driving Mr. Frischer’s work. When he started his career 30 years ago, he tried to visualize ancient Rome through books, maps, and artifacts. Now he is hooked on virtual reality.
The cube -- a 13-pound computer called a Shuttle XPC -- contains enough processing power to take people on fly-through tours of history, where buildings, walls, and cornerstones are rendered according to the best archaeological data available, with geographical precision.
To achieve the same effects a few years ago, Mr. Frischer would have ushered people into a specialized theater equipped with a supercomputer. Today he can present virtual-reality projects wherever he goes -- classrooms, museums, conferences, or workshops -- as long as he has access to a screen and a digital projector. On this morning, the final day of his art-history course, “Visualizing Rome,” he treats his students and several interested guests to a tour of the center of Rome as it looked in the hundreds of years before and after Julius Caesar’s reign.
“I’ll just pan around,” he says, as he shows a three-dimensional view of the Roman Forum, with towering columns and multiple archways in grays and browns. “You can see all the shops on the ground level. You can see this wonderful basin. We can go forward. We can stop. We can move wherever we want.”
He pauses to show students the view from an outdoor lecture platform, and continues, “You can get that sense of what it was like to be a speaker standing in front of the plaza.”
While scholars have been able to experience virtual reality for more than a decade, they have always had to wrestle with complex, expensive, and awkward hardware. Now, with compact computers that can run detailed graphics, these interactive, three-dimensional worlds have become more portable and accessible.
Virtual-reality purists complain that some versions are little more than glorified 3-D graphics. But professors who work with virtual architecture say that because participants can steer the programs themselves, zooming in and around buildings on the fly, they offer much more interactivity than is available in a passively viewed movie.
Mr. Frischer, who last year was appointed director of the university’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, sees the technology housed in his small black computer not only as a groundbreaking teaching tool. He hopes these computer models will become a new form of scholarly journal, where researchers reflect on the accuracy of detailed maps and timelines. The graphics in the Rome fly-through, for example, are backed up with scholarly citations and vetted by peers, just as traditional journals are.
“We are on the threshold of a period in which the 3-D computer model of a mathematical equation, complex molecule, distant galaxy, or ancient city will be as commonly used in university research and teaching as 3-D slides were throughout the 20th century,” Mr. Frischer wrote in a February report about the evolving role of the library, published by the Council on Library and Information Resources.
Cultural Virtual Reality
Mr. Frischer, 56, is thin, short, and fit, with intense brown eyes, and on this day he is perpetually moving around. (He sets his watch ahead five minutes because, he says, he is always late.) He talks about computer models and archaeology in a breathless rush, his compact frame bringing to mind a coiled spring.
His job, in addition to teaching classics and art history, is to bring humanities scholarship and technology together. The center he leads is well known as an innovator in bridging those worlds. It is best known for developing a vast database of Civil War material called the Valley of the Shadow (The Chronicle, March 20, 1998).
He came from the University of California at Los Angeles, where in 1998 he opened what was then called the Cultural Virtual Reality Lab, along with Diane Favro, a UCLA architecture professor. The lab, which continues today as part of UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center, led by Ms. Favro, is responsible for the Roman Forum project, which is part of a continuing effort called Rome Reborn. At UVa, Mr. Frischer hopes to expand on those digital models, and to create new ones, often in collaboration with his former colleagues.
“This is just such an explosive area,” he said.
During Mr. Frischer’s morning tour of ancient Rome, Justin Walsh, a doctoral student, was attending as a guest. As he watched the fly-through, he felt a mental jolt. The screen was showing a moment in time -- 100 BC -- in which a religious monument of black stone known as the Lapis Niger was visible above ground near the Senate House.
These days, when scholars go to visit the ruins, they can only view the stone in an underground excavation, because it was buried around 80 BC to make way for new construction.
Mr. Walsh, who is now an assistant professor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, a study-abroad program, said what he witnessed that day will help him to be a better teacher. It had always been difficult to tell students what was there, he admitted, “when you don’t know yourself what it looked like.”
But in Mr. Frischer’s class, Mr. Walsh was struck by the monument’s dominating presence as it abutted the wall of a small, sunken gathering space -- an arrangement that he had never been able to fully visualize before, and one that spoke to him about the mingling of religious and political structures even back then.
“It was, ‘OK, now I get it,’” he said.
Evolving Technology
To be sure, claims about the power of virtual reality have been bandied about in academe for some time. But because of high costs and the use of bulky or unfamiliar equipment, even proponents acknowledge that it has not yet become a must-have technology on the majority of college campuses.
In the 1990s one type of virtual-reality scholarship that received heightened attention within academe was called the CAVE, an acronym for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment and is also a reference to the “Simile of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic. In a CAVE, the most advanced forms of which can cost more than a million dollars to build, participants walk around a small room carrying a wand that enables them to manipulate virtual objects.
When inside a CAVE, a person’s movements are tracked and immediately processed to become part of the experience, so that the images one sees when turning one’s head to the left are the virtual objects at left. CAVE’s are optimal when used by only a few people at a time. But they have the advantage of being more immersive than anything projected on a screen, enabling scholars to grapple with three-dimensional problems.
Hundreds of CAVE projects -- from models of archaeology digs to visualizations of blood flow -- continue today at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where the technology was invented; at Brown University; and at several other campuses.
Other virtual-reality projects have required the use of “head-mounted displays,” specialized glasses or goggles wired to small portable computers. A person wearing such a headset can see objects in stereo vision while walking around a room, as if he or she has entered a layer of virtual space on top of the physical one.
A decade ago computer scientists were excited about the devices’ potential, but today many technologists have rejected head-mounted displays as too awkward. Besides, Mr. Frischer says, to explore the Roman Forum using such goggles would require two football fields worth of space.
Until the advent of the Shuttle computers, Mr. Frischer focused his energies on creating virtual-reality programs that could be viewed in theaters, like the 40-seat Visualization Portal at UCLA.
Then, in June 2003, he gave a presentation of the Roman Forum to a small crowd of art historians at the New York Public Library. The event, which required the installation of many pieces of expensive computer and sound equipment, took months to organize. The presentation was shown only twice.
At dinner afterward, a trustee of the library gave Mr. Frischer a cryptic message: Now try for paned glass, not stained glass, he said. Mr. Frischer interpreted that to mean that he had to find a way to make virtual-reality models more accessible to everyday people in everyday places.
He soon learned of Shuttle, a company known for what are called “small form” PC’s. The computers, which today sell for less than $2,000, are designed to hold the fastest and most up-to-date graphics cards. They are often brought to “LAN parties,” where serious gamers set up temporary local-area networks to play graphically rich, multiplayer video games.
‘No Sacrifice of Interactivity’
“We are grateful to wayward American youth,” Mr. Frischer said with a teasing smile. Without their ravenous appetite for portable speed, he said, the Shuttle computers might not have been built, and he would not have the ability to tote the Roman Forum from one classroom to another. The humanities institute he runs at UVa now has four of the machines. UCLA also has four.
“It represents no sacrifice of interactivity,” Mr. Frischer said. “A Shuttle with a powerful graphics card and two or more gigabytes of RAM can run even a big model like our Roman Forum model just about as well as can the supercomputer.”
Mr. Frischer is not the only one who wants to make virtual reality more accessible and less expensive. Each year prices drop for the computers that run CAVE technology, and smaller projects using high-resolution screens and 3-D graphics are on the way, says Thomas A. DeFanti, the director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the inventors of the CAVE.
He notes that hundreds of scientists in classrooms across the country are using stereo graphic systems called GeoWalls to teach geology in three dimensions. (The University of Minnesota’s geophysics department leads a group of participating institutions called the GeoWall Consortium.) Students wear polarized glasses to view 3-D images of, say, the way the earth moves, or how mountains are formed. The GeoWalls can be built with off-the-shelf computers and projection equipment and usually cost from $6,000 to $10,000 each.
Low-tech and low-cost virtual-reality programs do require compromises however. In a presentation via a Shuttle computer, there are no giant display screens and no surround-sound system. The experience is not as passive as watching a movie, because zoom-ins and fly-throughs can be directed at one’s pleasure. But there is no feeling of being there -- one cannot hear the echoes of footsteps or gaze at 3-D objects that seem close enough to touch.
For that reason, high-end theaters are still desirable, and UVa, like several other universities and corporations, is now constructing one so that researchers can occasionally get a more intense virtual experience than is available via the Shuttle.
Whether through a theater or through low-tech means, Mr. Frischer gets excited about the impact of computer modeling on the fields of archaeology and history.
In the past, he said, archaeology has required acts of destruction -- digging through dirt, moving artifacts. Historical renovation has run the risk of damaging precious ruins. And none of the digs or reconstructions have enabled people to see how spaces existed at different points in time.
Now, with the knowledge derived from those excavations and artifacts, a place or building can be reconstructed virtually without causing any physical harm, in any number of time periods.
Imagine, Mr. Frischer said during his class in May, “Planet Earth with a time bar.” People could use a sliding control bar to click at specific places at specific moments in history, he said, and “fly down into that event and get into that virtual environment.”
One of his graduate students, Scott Craver, spoke up. “When we realize what we’re capable of doing, I’m a little awed,” he said. “Yet this is a large part of the future of my field.”
Dean Abernathy, an architect and virtual-reality expert who is leaving UCLA to join Mr. Frischer at UVa this fall, cautioned that scholars can continue to fall into the trap of speculating or not bowing to authenticity when doing such work. “You have to be disciplined,” he said.
But if done right, he continued, “this is a chance for archaeologists to actually look up from the ground.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 51, Issue 46, Page A22