Digital architectural modelling is gaining ground among scholars and students of the ancient world. It offers the possibility of creating vivid representations of buildings, environments, and artefacts that can, if used correctly and with the appropriate methodological caveats in place, make valuable research contributions. Recent work in this field includes the handsome reconstructions in James Packer's volumes on Trajan's Forum in Rome, the Digital Roman Forum project of the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory (http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Forum/), and the work of the King's Visualisation Lab (http://www.kvl.cch.kcl.ac.uk).
The present volume makes an important contribution to this rapidly evolving field. It is highly technical in its subject matter and language, aimed at practitioners in the field and consequently abounding in terms like ‘backface culling’, ‘ambient occlusion’, and ‘texture mapping’ which, though they stand out oddly among the euphonies of Italian prose, will make the volume somewhat more accessible to those who read computer languages better than they do Italian. Despite its highly technical nature, the volume will also be of interest to those scholars of Roman architecture and urban history who want to use digital reconstruction, or to understand how it is produced and what it can (and cannot) be made to show.
The volume is set out as a ‘manual’ or handbook of practice, acknowledging the difficulty of choosing this form for such a constantly evolving subject matter but making a case for a single volume that compares different techniques and offers a practical guide on how to implement them. The book takes the town of Pompeii as a case study and the selection of artefacts and buildings modelled will therefore be familiar to most classicists.
The volume is organized in ten chapters; after an introduction setting out the context and scope of the work, ch. 2 discusses the workflow or ‘data acquisition pipeline’ for acquiring the basis for a digital model of an archaeological object, evaluating the relative merits and demerits of the different techniques available, which are then treated in detail in subsequent chapters. Ch. 3 looks at the particular requirements that a digital reconstruction project places on the accurate measurement and recording of artefacts. Chs 4 and 6 examine in more detail methods by which two different sorts of data can be turned into 3D geometry: data from laser scanners, which return a point cloud of locations in three-dimensional space, and photogrammetry, which uses photographs of an object from multiple viewpoints to generate a 3D model. Ch. 5 considers the nature of the interaction of the laser beams of ch. 4 on Roman marble surfaces. Having established modes of creating 3D geometry in virtual space, the volume turns to questions of managing its surface appearance, looking in ch. 7 at relief and the application of texture or colour to digital objects.
Ch. 8 looks at the creation of semantically enriched 3D models of archaeological artefacts, and discusses the important question of appropriate levels of modelling detail. Ch. 9 considers these various techniques and challenges in their application to the volume's overall context of Pompeii. It documents the research and creation of a set of models of elements from the site — relief, sculpture in the round, and various architectural and architectonic elements — and evaluates the workflow and time taken for each, representing this in tabular and graphic form as well as illustrating the results. This offers a valuable practical demonstration of different techniques at work on the same site.
Ch. 10 discusses the nature of web systems for collecting and deploying digital models which may have been created in different file systems by different teams for different goals; the challenges inherent in organizing digital content in this way are enormous (and by no means confined to digital architectural modelling). After a discussion of graphical and 3D file formats the chapter's authors describe the Sistema Informativo Unificato of the Naples and Pompeii Soprintendenza, created in collaboration with the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: this consists of a system for documenting and storing multimedia content and a GIS, with the goal of integrating and organizing documents of many different types and purposes. As 3D reconstruction work can generate very large volumes of data in several different formats, the challenges inherent in such a project will be familiar to many in the field and the chapter's discussion of the typology of data and methodology of its deployment will be useful even when the specific file formats it discusses are not.
This is true of the volume overall: as the editors acknowledge in their introductory remarks, the attempt to create a technical manual for a field with such a diversity of practice, evolving so fast, is bound to involve a degree of inherent obsolescence. The solutions and methods suggested throughout the book will not always suit the workflow or resources of any given reader, and both hardware and software will continue to develop at a dizzying pace. The volume's intelligent and detailed exploration and documentation of a series of different working practices, however, means that it is well worth reading, for the questions it asks as well as for the specific solutions it proposes.
The volume is handsomely illustrated, as is appropriate for a work on this subject. Its bibliography is in large part Anglophone, with a high preponderance of works on the technical aspects of visualization software and visual perception, rather than on history, archaeology, or architecture — this reflects the character of the volume, and provides a valuable resource for further reading.
