CityEngine allowed the Rome Reborn modelers to create the city 10 times faster than previous software. 

Frischer, who is quite persuasive in attracting other talent to the project, invited everyone to come see a remarkable website: "Making History Interactive" (www.caa2009.org). Coming to SIGGRAPH was also a challenge. It cost $10,000 to hire students and every bench and workstation and display had to be hand built and another $10,000 in travel and hotel.

There are other applications for this technology. Imagine the government GIS system going to a 3D image of various cities for zoning and planning or the county assessor's office. Imagine being able after a few years of changes to show a time lapse of the city's growth. Certainly with Hollywood's love of city disaster movies there is a bright future for this technology.

Rome Reborn 1.0 is loaded onto an IBM Cell Server. Bary Minor of IBM explained the Cell Server that uses Cell processors. The Cell server has 14 Cell blades each with two processors. Each processor has 9 cores. One core is for the OS, the other cores are vector cores. Thus the box has 252 cores, 14 of which run Linux Fedora 7 and 238 are available for Rome Reborn 1.0 and realtime crunching. Users can fly through, change illumination and shading or soft shadow views with texture off. The box has displayed models up to 320 million pixels (a Boeing 777 interactive model that is 25 gigabytes in size) and rendered realtime this same amount. Rome 1.0 has about 150 million pixels. IBM's software is called iRT or interactive Ray Tracer. Fedora 7 is a 64-bit Linux system.

The Coliseum has never looked so good.

Rome Reborn 2.0 was put together by mental images on a Sun Station with RealityServer. RealityServer is a scalable, server-based 3D web services software platform supports Autodesk, Softimage and all of the high-end CAD programs.

Frischer pointed out that the Coliseum, though procedural in its polygon build, is overlayed with a substantial number of streaming jpg's making the fly around even more impressive for a realtime program.

One might wonder how the colors and textures of Rome can be recreated after so many years. Frischer said that there are many marble and textured remains that archaeology has been able to restore to give a reasonably good recreation of what Rome looked like in its day. "The Romans loved color," Frischer stressed, and he believes that Rome was indeed a very colorful city.

Some of the ways that this project is being applied include a Google map of the same database, which is a GPU renderer.

One application of Rome Reborn is to provide a large walk around map on the floor with a handheld screen senses GPS and gyroscopic movements. When it hits a particular spot it displays the feature of that spot. Turning and facing different directions turns the display. Another feature of this device is that the user can point it at any image of the old ruins and it shows a 3d of what the building looked like.

Another way to view Rome is on a super sized wide screen display. Mersive is the company that allows low cost projectors to be combined to make large and high-resolution displays. Rome Reborn was displayed using multiple high-definition projectors on a screen. The software stitches it and makes it blend without seems. Rome displayed in panorama projection is a mere 27 million pixels.

Frischer said there is a potential for virtual sims but they are still expensive so these may not take shape any time soon. Programs such as Second Life have been kicked around. Frischer said that there is a possibility of one day creating avatars and or social interaction so that peer review can meet and be present from any location within Rome Reborn. Certainly students of history will enjoy this technology if they can walk the streets with their professors.

Eric Post is an attorney, journalist, computer graphic artist, helicopter pilot/mechanic and former pastor. Although he is a traditional artist, he enjoys modeling and landscape scenes in CG and uses various applications for medical illustrations at his office. From 2004-2006, Post was senior technical editor for the Renderosity magazine and e-zine. From 2006-2007, Post served as a staff writer for the Renderosity Front Page News, and edited various Renderosity publications.