From Carly - Pompeii and Constitution Center

This is the wiki page of a research team who virtually reconstructed and populated ancient Pompeii. On this page you can find a paper about their process, screen shots, and videos…lots of links so have fun. I think the videos are pretty cool except their faces look weird, some of the cloth seems a little too ‘stuck’ to the body, everyone is walking around alone which is unnatural, and in the large plaza area, I think the cobblestones don’t repeat very well. I can pick out the repeating unit too easily but maybe that is just the textile print designer in me.


This also happens to be about Pompeii but from what I can gather I think it’s actually a different team of people who worked on this project.

“This paper proposes a new development for the innovative revival of life in ancient fresco paintings in ancient Pompeii and creation of narrative spaces. The revival is based on real scenes captured on live video sequences augmented with real-time autonomous groups of 3D virtual fauna and flora.” They refer to this combination as “mixed reality”.

This paper discusses facial and cloth simulation but its overall focus is bringing preserved frescoes from the actual site to life. Maybe we could apply this idea to the friezes on the painted temple or Guaman Poma illustrations somehow? Also if you search around, the same authors have a lot of papers on cloth simulation out there.

In other news I visited the constitution center this weekend. The arrangement of their audio/speaker systems was really impressive. I sketched out some of their set ups that I will share at the meeting today. Maybe we should arrange a meeting with someone there to discuss their engineering process. While there I also saw the vide/projection/performance called Freedom Rising. The visitors sit in a sort of small arena, stadium seating. Above the seats is a large ring of curved projection screens (with projectors in the center of the ceiling), there are also videos/images projected onto the floor, where a speaker stands who tells the story of the constitution, also at one point, and circular screen lowers down around the person telling the story, at this point there is literally projection surrounding the audience members (I have a crappy drawing of this too). Again the print designer in me evaluated the repeat of the projections on 360 degrees of screen and I found it pretty seamless and impressive. Also there were some scenes in this multimedia presentation where there were modern day actors (average people on the street debating politics etc.) layered over old drawings and paintings and it actually wasn’t as cheesy as it sounds. So that is another way we could potentially use Guaman Poma’s illustrations and bring them to life.

If you haven't seen Freedom Riding you should go check it out.