Take a ‘walk’ inside Roman buildings
Leicester’s ruined Roman past can now be seen springing back to life in front of your eyes thanks to a remarkable iPad app and 3D digital technology developed by a team from De Montfort University.
Standing at several of the city’s most important Roman sites, you can hold your iPad up and use it as a ‘window’ to see breathtaking imagery of what the Roman building around you looked like.
With the help of augmented reality technology, the type used in electronic gaming, you can ‘walk into’ and tour several Roman buildings, superimposing the 3D virtual reconstructions onto the real-life scene in front of you, which change as you walk around or face different directions.
“Buried under the John Lewis car park, for example, there is a large villa,” explained DMU technology lecturer Eric Tatham, one of the app builders. “This app really brings it to life. The scale of it all is a real eye-opener, seeing it all around you through the iPad.
“Beforehand, we had artists’ replications of these buildings but now you get a real sense of what they were like to be inside them.”
And in a virtual treasure hunt, you can also search out several Roman artefacts placed around the buildings, which you can collect, spin around on screen and zoom in on to look at in fine detail.
“You find the items in augmented reality on the app and each time you collect one of them, you get a stamp, so you can collect the set,” added Eric.
The Virtual Romans app is being officially launched at the Jewry Wall museum on Friday as part of its re-opening following its annual winter closure.
Harnessing the expertise of the DMU digital technology experts, the project has been a collaboration spanning several years with archaeological researchers at the University of Leicester and the Jewry Wall Museum.
The 3D virtual reconstructions can now be viewed in four ways - on the website www.romanleicester.dmu.ac.uk, at an interactive touchscreen kiosk in the museum in front of the excavated ruins of the Roman baths, through a 3D print in the museum of the Roman Baths, and with the iPad app.
Project leader Nick Higgett, principal lecturer at DMU’s School of Design, explained: “Our bit has been the digital reconstructions of the buildings in 3D, the 3D scanning of archaeological artefacts from the museum, and to make it all available through mobile devices such as the iPad app.
