Podcast featuring Bernard Frischer on the Rome Reborn project

The audio is here.

Frischer mentions some problems he’s had getting materials into Second Life, so he’s been using something called Open Simulator instead. I recall a ruby-powered tool for pushing autocad or sketchup models into Second Life (it’s on this blog somewhere ;) and of course there’s all sorts of work done using commercial game engines to ‘virtualize’ models. With the obvious resources he has, I wonder why those avenues weren’t explored. Anyway, I think it was Troels who once mentioned it – but whatever tool we use for these simulations, we need to be including the ‘shit’ – the horse droppings, the garbage, the people too. Right now, all of these always feel like Pompeii after the tourists go home… In fairness, Frischer notes that that is something they are working on for their virtual Hadrian’s Villa.

Kinda ironic, in a way – Hadrian’s villa being a virtual world when it was built in the first place. A virtual virtual world? We’re getting all recursive… As I’ve argued before, virtual worlds are nothing new in human experience. It’s just the delivery method & fidelity that keeps changing.