Over the summer, a research team from the University of Arkansas' World Languages, Literatures and Cultures department visited and photographed ancient Roman sites in Tunisia and Sicily to develop immersive, virtual tours of the protected ruins.
University of Arkansas professor Curtis Maughan from World Languages and Digital Humanities and professor of classics and game design David Frederick joined graduate students Rachel Murray and Mitchell Simpson for the project. The group also collaborated with faculty from the University of Manouba in Tunis.
The project, "Mediterranean 360", uses panoramic photography from the ancient sites to produce interactive, accessible virtual tours and game-based applications. Frederick said the goal is to teach cross-cultural history of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean while focusing on overlooked regions of the ancient world.
"Bulla Reggia, Dougga, Uthina... as a life-long classicist I knew actually very little about those sites and that's because they're marginalized within my own field," Frederick said. "So, we chose these sites with that story in mind, which is really diversifying the story of classics."
He said the project, and collaboration with Manouba, also helps to promote game design and development at the University of Arkansas.
"This is a really critical skill set for our students," Frederick said. "And for us, this is all part of a piece of having humanities be the driver of that."
Once the sites have been captured in their current condition by the 360-degree camera, spherical reconstruction drawings by a small team of artists can be layered on top of the 360-degree images to suggest how the site looked at a given historical moment. The images and reconstruction drawings can then be imported into the game engine Unity3d, to create 360-degree navigable environments.
Maughan said the images will be compiled later this semester by undergraduate and graduate students using the gaming software.
