THE FUTURE OF THE PASTReview by Ben DavisROME REBORN FORUM OF TRAJAN VIRTUAL LOS ANGELES LEARNING SITES ANCIENT EGYPT RESEARCH ASSOCIATES GIZA PLATEAU MAPPING PROJECT QIN: TOMB OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM DYNAMIC TIMELINES Scientific people...know very well that Time is only a kind of Space," wrote H. G. Wells in The Time Machine. He defended his argument by observing how data from a barometer, when plotted over time, produce a spatial image. Now, a century later, electronic computers offer a ubiquitous and far more sophisticated means of manipulating time and information into graphic form. Three-dimensional computer visualizations have become a mainstay of modern science, vastly expanding our understanding of the world around us. Intriguingly, the computer-mediated blending of time and space is also being applied inward, to help us understand ourselves. In museums, in computer software and on the Internet, a new technique of "cultural data visualization" is beginning to take shape. In some cases, researchers are using visualization software, originally intended for scientific and architectural modeling, to re-create the past with a high degree of authenticity. Ironically, much of the current work on virtual reconstructions is taking place in Los Angeles--a city noted for its ephemeral structures and constant development. One of the most notable projects is Rome Reborn, a collaboration among researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and a raft of U.S. and Italian sponsors. This ambitious project will yield a multilayered, 3-D, interactive virtual-reality simulation of Rome from the ninth century B.C. to the fourth century. Aimed primarily at high school and college students, Rome Reborn would be distributed along high-speed Internet lines and might include virtual guides speaking both English and Latin. The entire project will not be finished until 2020, but the Roman Forum and architecture from the Age of Augustus (50 B.C. to 14 A.D.) should be ready in time for bimillennial celebrations. Other such architectural-historical re-creations will be done sooner. The J. Paul Getty Trust is supporting the construction of a simulated Forum of Trajan in Rome; the result will be on display at the opening of the new Getty Museum in Los Angeles in December 1997. The exhibition will display the virtual forum along with actual statuary from the site so that the visitor can get a sense of how the real objects fit in their historical environment. Both these ancient Rome projects draw on a software program called uSim (Urban Simulation System), developed at U.C.L.A. In Rome Reborn, each of the 14 political districts of the ancient city will be mapped over 14 centuries. A four-dimensional database (spatial coordinates and time) models architectural changes over the recorded life span of the city. Every time a user switches to a different moment in history, the program quickly redraws that part of the city to conform to its appearance at that period. The database can be accessed either locally at U.C.L.A. or globally through the World Wide Web. When Rome Reborn is complete, an architecture professor could have his or her students meet at the virtual Pantheon of 129 A.D. and conduct the class entirely from inside the model. The virtual Rome, like the real one, will not be built in a day, but conceivably this project could let the interested user visit hundreds of years in a few hours. William Jepson, director of computing in the department of architecture and design at U.C.L.A., anticipates that the project's database will change as new architectural discoveries are made and authenticated. Researchers' understanding of the past changes as time goes by; someday it may be possible to see parts of Rome not only as they were at different times but also as they were thought to have been by different generations of reconstructors. Jepson is also working on another project, Virtual Los Angeles, that focuses on contemporary buildings, both real and imagined. The Virtual Los Angeles effort, which started a few years ago, now embraces about 25 square kilometers (10 square miles) of the most densely developed areas of the city. Many of the models for Virtual Los Angeles were commissions from development corporations to explore structures that were never physically built. All the models incorporated in this project are time-stamped, so that anything built in virtual reality automatically has a historical annotation. As a result, the records of a Los Angeles that never actually materialized coexist with those of the real thing--only their annotations distinguish them. These visualization time machines straddle not just space and time but also academia and business. In the late 1980s researcher William Riseman of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts used a computer-aided design (CAD) program to assist in problems of archaeology. Then, in 1992, Riseman met Donald H. Sanders, an archaeologist and teacher who was looking for visually effective ways to present the past to his students. The meeting led to the creation of Learning Sites, a company that now designs and develops interactive 3-D databases and rendering software to make the data visible. Learning Sites makes a profit selling products and services that employ visualizations as teaching tools, research aids and information banks. Eventually these tools and models may be linked via the Internet to create 3-D virtual libraries. Some of the sites that are already available include the Mastabas at Giza in Egypt; the Temples of Gebel Barkal in Nubia; the Sun Temple at Meroe in the Sudan; King Aspelta's tomb at Nuri in the Sudan; the Fortress of Buhen in Egypt; the Sanctuary of King Antiochus I at Nemrud Dagi in Turkey; and the Vari House in Greece. The Vari House is a farmhouse in Attica, located in southeastern Greece. In the summer of 1966 a group of British archaeologists published a thorough analysis of this house, which showed that it was built sometime between 325 and 275 B.C., apparently by a family of beekeepers. Drawing on that analysis, Learning Sites constructed a virtual-reality model of the house using virtual-reality modeling language and Java technology. The company then assembled a curriculum aimed at teenage students. Each section of the model is attended by study questions such as "What kinds of materials would tend to survive thousands of years of exposure to the weather?" At the end of the questions, the student receives brief answers and is invited to go to the model and investigate the topics further. The technology can also simulate an architectural dig to give a sense of how physical history is actually recovered. Learning Sites is one of several new companies working with museums, schools and archaeologists to create 3-D models for exhibitions and education programs, CD-ROM publications, kiosks and digitizing services for the preservation of documents and images. This commercial approach is fostering the birth of a new "virtual archaeology" that is more sensitive to conservation issues and the preservation of cultural heritage. By contracting with institutions as well as individuals, companies such as Learning Sites are making the collection, study and dissemination of archaeological data broader and more efficient. One organization that has done particularly comprehensive studies of virtual architectural reconstructions is Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA). The association was founded in 1986 by Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and Harvard University's Semitic Museum, and by composer and producer Matthew McCauley. It does extensive field study of the Giza Plateau in Egypt and has produced detailed models of the Khufu Pyramid Complex; the Khafre Pyramid Complex; the Menkaure Pyramid Complex; and the Sphinx Temple. AERA, working with Zahi Hawass in Egypt and such researchers as John Sanders of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, Peggy Sanders of Archaeological Graphic Services in Chicago and Tom Jaggers of Jerde Partnership in Venice, Calif., has developed a network of archaeologists, technologists and digital artists. One of AERA's intentions is to further the notion that the great archaeological structures are emergent phenomena, arising--according to complexity theory--from simple local rules. This approach goes hand in glove with digital visualization technology, wherein small files of data can be linked to produce ever larger visual structures. The modeling of the Giza Plateau and its architectural monuments, for instance, required compiling maps, published surveys and excavation reports into a 3-D graphics database. AERA produced a contour map with a resolution of down to one meter (three feet), amplified from its own survey-control network at Giza. This map was then processed to extract the spatial coordinates for every line segment of each contour, producing a file containing more than 100,000 points that describe a 2.5-by-three-kilometer, 3-D plot of the plateau. Atop these data, using AutoCAD software, researchers built 3-D wire-frame models of the 10 Giza pyramids, mortuary and valley temples, causeways, the Sphinx and 150 mastaba tombs. With the computer model of the Giza Plateau and its pyramid complexes completed, animation software could process the entire database to permit a viewer to fly in, around and through the model. One result was a 45-second video sequence for PBS television station WGBH in Boston, which aired the segment as part of the "This Old Pyramid" episode of NOVA on November 4, 1992. A more detailed model is now being built using a texture-mapping technique to apply realistic-looking materials, inscriptions and wall reliefs onto the Giza structures. This last "mapping" process is important for gaining a deeper understanding of the structures and their relation to ancient Egyptian culture. AERA has been aggressively collecting information on architectural details and materials. Drawing on new ideas from complexity theory, McCauley (co-founder of AERA) hopes to use these data to investigate the powerful self-organizing forces brought into play by simple local rules in ancient Egypt. Historical visualization can form the basis of another commercial enterprise: computer games. Learn Technologies Interactive, or LTI, has created Qin: Tomb of the Middle Kingdom, a CD-ROM game that combines archaeological and historical data into an imaginative simulation of the tomb of Qinshihuang, the first emperor of China. The Qin legends and stories are some of the most exciting in Asian history. They were suddenly tied to reality in 1974, when Chinese archaeologists discovered an army of terra-cotta figures--thousands of life-size soldiers and horses that guard Qin's tomb. Although the Chinese government has refused to release images of the tomb near the famous Terra-cotta Army in Xi'an, researchers at LTI were able to draw on other scholarly material to design a simulation that is startling in its graphic immediacy and its serious educational intent. Taking scholarly research and making it into a computer game is risky business; the Qin project is notable because it makes such a careful attempt to use fictionalized visualization to stimulate a genuine interest in history. Luyen Chou, co-founder and director of LTI, and his team of designers incorporated an impressive amount of information about the tomb and the surrounding terra-cotta figures--an effort that clearly shows when one plays the game. Put in the role of amateur archaeologist, the user falls into the tomb and must navigate through rooms and artifacts. To give the images a genuine sense of eastern Asian and Chinese aesthetics, the designers researched and photographed authentic materials and fabrics and then texture-mapped these onto surfaces generated by computer graphics programs. One of the more interesting aspects of Qin: Tomb of the Middle Kingdom is that the user must learn to interpret clues from objects found in the tomb. The clues are given in Chinese, but there is a translator character who will translate the information into English. An encyclopedia on the disk serves as a helpful reference. LTI thus makes historical research into a labyrinth from which only the intellectually passionate can return. This approach gives the game's young audience an insight into real history, where legend and fact mingle, and simple answers are seldom forthcoming. The Qin game holds a more sobering message for academic applications of visualization techniques. They may work well for 3-D objects but fall short for presenting other kinds of information, such as bibliographical or historical annotations. The kind of encyclopedia and translator used in Qin may make a useful gaming device, but these techniques are probably not appropriate for more serious work. Yet 3-D representations of data could be helpful to cultural researchers in making sense of the massive amounts of such data that they often confront. Ronald L. MacNeil of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory and others have tackled this conundrum by making traditional databases three-dimensional. Working with MacNeil and the late Muriel Cooper of the Visible Language Workshop, Robin Kullberg, now at the Art Technology Group in Boston, authored a data visualization program called Dynamic Timelines. She combined visual techniques from graphic design and cinema (such as zoom, animation and transparency) with 3-D interactive rendering, to synthesize a dramatic information "space." The software lets a user take a simulated flight through 265 annotated images from the collection of the George Eastman House that represent the history of photography from 1830 to 1950. Kullberg's 3-D virtual world depicts abstract historical information rather than concrete representations of physical architecture. She describes her program as an atlas of history, a map of events in time. A physical point of reference (such as a photograph) exists as an island in a virtual ocean of related data. By diving into the 3-D space, a researcher can move toward or away from a specific topic without losing visual contact with related information; both content and context are always visible. Dynamic Timelines and similar data visualization tools provide a seamless interface between physical representation and abstract information. The graphical skills that researchers have applied to architectural reconstructions and scientific visualization can now be applied to database architecture as well. This potential is fostering a blending of scientific methodology and cultural content. The ability of the computer to transmute one form of information into another--data into pictures, pictures into scenarios--affords an amazing new mechanism for remembering the past. In a world constantly besieged by new technology, it is important to recall that the survival of culture ultimately depends on memory. |