ARCHAEOLOGICAL SERENDIPITY?

Just imagine wandering at your leisure through a recreation of Athens or Rome at the height of their power and influence. At MellaniuM our very "raison d'etre" could be distilled as the creation, nay, I should say the actual resurrection at a virtual realistic level of the achaeological remnants of these glorious civilisations. Indeed there are vast assets of 3D models in databanks of acedemic institutions around the world which have been used to provide vistas and fly-through movies of the plethora of cities which flourished in the core of ancient civilizations from Mesopotamia to Egypt and from Athens to Rome. These models can now be used to their full potential to create a vast interactive space available for hundreds of participants from all over the World. What an experience it would be to be immersed with your friends in walking around these cities? To explore the art and decorations of some sumptuous villa in Pompeii or walk through the Parthenon as it was on the first day it was completed by Pericles in 435BC.

It has been stated that it will be another 5 years before this feat of virtual representation can be accomplished. However at MellaniuM we have already developed the necessary application to provide these 3D virtual archaeologcal visualizations.

We have to sincerely thank the Kings' College Visualisation Lab for supplying us with the magnificent 3D rendering example of the "Theatre of Pompey"

Indeed the concept hinges on the ability to import high polygon models (static meshes) with high resolution textures into an MMO platform such as UNREAL. The environments and client are locally administered off your PC. Any web based browser client where the assets are stored remotely and must be downloaded as you travel through the virtual space can only result in lag and "less than immersive" latency effects. We have produced a movie to compare the graphical fidelity for archaeological visualizations of the MellaniuM application and Second Life.

The movie compares the Theatre of Pompey and the Titanic rendered in Second Life and in UNREAL using the MellaniuM application.

If you would like your personal demonstration of these archaeological wonders by a live streaming walkthrough of these spaces give me a call on SKYPE at joe133952