Virtual tours through time

Museums, educators and others are increasingly using more videos, animations, graphics and other technologies to illustrate ancient historical sites to gain the benefits that books, copies and drawings cannot be brought.

Kathy Choi touches a screen in kiosk mode, then looks up at a wall screen to look at the digitally created golden brown soil meandering through the smooth green lawn with lakes and children. blue river in. Ancient buildings in the Ohio River Valley are now covered with soil and grass and trees and walls have become shabby due to development, flooding and agriculture. But Kathy saw them again with landscapes like theirs 2,000 years ago thanks to a computer flight. ' It makes it all seem more real ,' said Choi, 59, while controlling her direction through an interactive video tour to visit Fort Ancient ruins and ant buildings. other structure of Cincinnati museum center.

During a virtual tour of an 18th-century Indian village in North Dakota, visitors can enter an earthen hut and hear sound effects created by an animated character. women are shaving the skin of a deer. Archaeological Technology Lab at North Dakata State University used three-dimensional computer sketches to recreate the village of the Mandan tribe, a North American Indian tribe of the Great Plains.

Colonial Williamsburg is creating a three-dimensional virtual model of a recently unearthed theater in Williamsburg, Virginia's center that has been restored since the 18th century. The organization also intends to add animation in This theater project and finally creating a virtual tour of the whole town, said Lisa Fischer, director of the organization's digital history center.

An exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts used three-dimensional animation to recreate a temple and a palace built during the Pharaoh Akhenaten and Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. The museum intends to hold a virtual heritage exhibition during the Assyrian Empire next year.

The museum's director, Phil Getchell, said the museum's officials are looking for other new ways to use virtual reality technology,

Exhibitions and virtual legacy projects a decade ago are still new, and are now popular in Europe and parts of Asia, which receive a lot of funding from the country. Virtual heritage projects are found in several countries including Italy, Germany and Japan.

They are on the rise in the US because computer speed and technology have improved a lot and costs have also decreased. The cost of equipment a few years ago over $ 1 million can now be purchased for less than a few tens of thousands of dollars.

At Hood Art Museum at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, visitors can observe real stone carvings from the palace of the 9th-century Assyrian king, King Ashurnasirpal II, at Nimrud. A fly-through computer animation of the rooms in the palace is digitally reconstructed showing the sculptures in their unique locations (fly-through is a technique used to view models numerical terrain, in this technique users can move around 3-dimensional terrain, so it feels like flying. Visitors can also control their direction through a virtual tour of a 3-dimensional model of this palace.

Virtual legacy is also seen as a way to preserve and store details of the sites that are threatened by the environment, the pollution or the power of the Nimrud - as a result of war and looting and a means of helping Let people better understand the past.

'It creates a vivid image that can last long in the imagination of the public and bring insight and appreciation of lost architecture and culture,' said Mr. John. Hancock, professor of architecture at Cincinnati University and program director 'Architectural Buildings: Virtual Ancient Valley Exploration,' said.

An interactive video tour has brought visitors to the ruins of Ohio and Kentucky, and people are discussing to take the tour to museums in Indiana, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Connecticut.

In an effort to find the best way to recreate the architecture of the earth, Hancock's team first thought that the animated camera had to move viewers as if they were walking on the ground because most heritage projects Every virtual has more standard architectural styles, such as buildings, where cameras move along and more lice are inside the monuments. But then they decided to move the camera upwards, creating a vision like a bird's eye to give viewers a better idea of ​​the whole architecture when they were intact.

Mr. Hancock said that reproductions in films like ' Gladiator ' have urged the university's research and media labs to make their projects look more real, but the reconstruction virtual legacy is not intended to compete with Hollywood or replace visiting historic sites.

He said: 'You see these are computer performances. But if done well, people can get a practical amount just enough to foster their imagination. '

Advocates have raised concerns about how to verify the data used to create replication and ensure that the public will understand that no reproduction can be absolutely accurate. .

Jeffrey Clark, director of the North Dakota State Laboratory, laboratory that carried out a project to regenerate the village of the Mandan tribe, said his colleagues at the Berlin conference, the conference he recently attended. , discussed how to be sure that the public will understand the limits of virtual reproduction.

'Archaeologists realize that any reconstruction - real or imaginary - is just a guess, but an ordinary museum visitor can give it a value that is practically unavailable. , ' he said.

Some Italian colleagues at the Berlin conference proposed a 'slip rate of certainty', which would classify the level of confidence that archaeologists have in a particular reconstruction. But so far no official principles have been applied.

Although there are potential drawbacks, but the virtual legacy project is moving forward, studying ways of connecting with the senses rather than just sight and hearing and even being able to use holograms

'History does not take place in a two-dimensional world,' said Sander. 'It happens in a three-dimensional world in which people interact with each other, and that's why this field will grow because the benefits have become more obvious.'

Thanh Van