Friday, May 18, 2007

Walk like an Egyptian - or a Roman


Okay, so the word "Egypt" is mentioned nowhere in this article accept in its title. But regular readers will know that I am an absolute push-over for blending technology and archaeology, and the applications are just as good for Egyptology as any other archaeological field, so I've slipped this one in today:
"Computer scientists and cultural heritage researchers are assessing whether today's increasingly sophisticated 3-d computer technology can be combined with the most recent historical evidence to produce significantly improved visual reconstructions of churches, palaces and other ancient sites.
This could help historians, students and museum visitors gain a much better feel of how such sites were perceived by the people who used them in the past and what it was actually like to be there. The project is being funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The work is being carried out by researchers from Warwick Manufacturing Group and the new Warwick Digital Laboratory, University of Warwick.
In particular, the effects of smoke, dust, fog and interior lighting conditions (all of which would have impacted on the way that buildings were experienced by contemporaries) can now be modelled very accurately, for the first time. New developments in display technology also mean it is possible to produce images that are many times brighter, more vivid in colour, incorporate better contrast between light and dark -- and are therefore much more realistic -- than those previously achievable."
See the above page for the full story.