Virtual World Hybrids

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reports on emerging hybrids of real virtual worlds, pointing to GoogleEarth, Photosynth (Windows only) and to a new entry in the field, Everyscape, due to launch this fall. Here is Time Magazine's pick of the best GoogleEarth pictures. Arrington was interviewed recently by the podcasters at iinovate.

For a brief background, here's the HTML version of "Experience of a Hybrid Information Space between an Outdoor Field and an Immersive Virtual World", published in 2005 by T. Ogi (University of Tsukuba, Japan) and T. Fujise (Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc.)

Rome Reborn, Virtually

c|net news has a new piece on a virtual historical world, the Rome Reborn 1.0 project at the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities under the leadership of Dr. Bernard Frischer, who founded the UCLA CVR Lab. On June 11, Mayor Walter Veltroni of Rome unveiled a public viewing. Photo Copyright University of Virginia

The project began at the University of California, nearly 10 years ago, and has involved collaboration among UVA, the UCLA Experimental Technologies Center, the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Lab, and the Reverse Engineering Lab at the Politecnico de Milan.

The project shows almost the entire city of Rome within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls in 320 A.D., when Rome was the multicultural capital of the Western world.
According to the CVR site, the material will be available from the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University.

Virtual Heritage Imagery

Institute for Digital Theology hsd created a virtual tour of the Upper Church of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi in San Francisco.

The tour is based on architectural aspects of the building and images taken prior to the disastrous 1997 earthquake that caused extensive damage to the structure. The result is a stunning electronic tour of the basilica before some of its artwork was irreparably damaged.

Dr. Glenn Gunhouse, of the Georgia State University, School of Art and Design is involved in adapting new technologies to the needs of teachers and researchers in the field of Art History. See some of his work among the Pelican Crossing's Virtual Heritage images. (Sample below)