What's the matter with Google Earth's Ancient Rome?

Just how great is the new Google Earth 3D recreation of ancient Rome? The one that is supposed to let you wander through the streets of the city, in virtual reality authenticated and developed by academics from the University of Virginia.

Inspired by the enthusiastic reviews and having a bit of time on my hands now that the lectures have finished, I decided to spend an hour exploring the site.

No, it wasn’t as good as I had hoped.

For a start, it proved impossible to load it onto my relatively new Mac laptop.  So I had to wait till I got to my newer and larger office desktop. Here it loaded OK, but it still wasn’t all plain sailing. Maybe if I had more experience of computer games, I’d be more adept at the controls of this sort of thing. But for it wasn’t so much a pleasant stroll through the ancient streets, but a ghastly roller coaster of a ride. As with Google Maps, an inadvertent click on the mouse and you find yourself zooming wildly in and out – and in this case, given half a chance, the reconstruction of the ancient monuments dissolved uncontrollably into an image of the archaeological ruins and back again.

After 30 minutes of this I had a fearful headache and felt a bit as if I’d been on a rough Channel crossing. And I never did manage to do anything remotely like ‘walk through the Forum’.  Practice at the controls would no doubt help.

But was the whole thing any good?

Well, in some ways it’s very impressive – simply to get a plausible version of the ancient city onto a single website has to count as a big achievement. But there are problems too.

Just as there were whole generations brought up to imagine a luscious Rome through the eyes of Alma-Tadema (full of scantily clad women and rose-petals), so there will now be millions who envisage the ancient city as a version of Sim City – slightly threatening, over-clean, depopulated and under-coloured. It doesn’t matter terribly, so long as we don’t confuse it any ancient reality.

There’s also the question of quite how ‘authoritative’ the information we are given here is. You can click on a whole variety links to find out more about the building concerned. But an large number just take you to Wikipedia, with all the lack of quality control that implies.

But there are also some very odd oddities. I concentrated on the area around the Temple of Vesta and the Arch of Titus (in the picture) in the Forum. Now, I don’t keep completely up to date with discoveries in the city o Rome, and the picture of the ancient city DOES change every day. But was there really a small temple directly in front of the Arch of Titus to the west, as my version of GoogleEarth has it?

I may have missed something. But if anyone can explain, I’d be grateful.

Comments

[Josh]

Completely agree with Mary and the commenters about the difficulty of loading the damn thing: I spent well over an hour waiting for it to bring up these magical buildings and it never happened.

Far better is a combination of Juvenal and a book I bought outside the Colosseum for a fiver a decade ago: you lay transparencies with reconstructions over photos of the present. Nice.

[Cameron Bell]

I have recently been to Rome. I found it ineteresting to see the actual shape of the structures of the Roman ruins on Google Earth, that I had previously seen in Rome.

[David N]

The temple they put by the Arch of Titus must surely be Jupiter Stator. Coarelli won't be too pleased. I spotted this on their press-release stills, and it immediately sets the tone. Nice...but dubious.

[Randolph]

It's not a very good experience, for a number of reasons. There are some technical issues that we know how to resolve--it's possible to create a genuinely immersive view of an urban model for only large amounts of money. (A room, projectors--it's an installation piece.) There's better navigational technology. The quality of the modeling, though,... hmmm, well, it's not I suppose more effort than that of a really large computer game, which in some ways this is. Would it be worth doing, do you think? If one could simulate, visually at least, "walking through the streets of ancient Rome", would it be worth it?

[Jamie James]

Dear Mary, I first heard about Google Earth's virtual Imperial Rome program on your blog -- the best source for interesting news in the classics field. I downloaded it and gave it a try. There's nothing, or very little actually to be learned from the program. I get a much more vivid sense of life in ancient Rome from reading the younger Pliny's letters, Juvenal, and Petronius than I do from this website; but it appeals strongly to my inner 12-year-old, the budding classics geek. My main objection is that it's impossible actually to see the reconstruction of Rome for the forest of little blue squares and flags telling you what you would se if they weren't covering it up. It's a bit like building a superhighway through a gorgeous countryside, and then allowing billboards to be built every 100 feet, obliterating the view. I've tried unchecking the boxes for points of interest and labels, but it seems to have no effect. Do any of the previous, internet-savvy posters have advice about this? If I can't see the reconstruction for all the "helpful" signposts, I will just delete it. Your blog is a classical lifeline to me in Bali!

[John]

I'm not sure I understand the disillusionment surrounding the program. With respect to the "point" of it all, how is it not at the very least an excellent teaching tool for young adults interested in ancient Rome? And at the most a new and exciting way to visualize the elusive ancient city? But re: the controls...Mary, I am an avid Google Earth user and fair with technology, but I too find the controls appalling in general. But if that's the biggest problem with the Rome program, I say, bravo!...along with a couple of aspirin and a tall glass of ice water.

[Nicholas Wibberley]

A Neo-Platonist, if there be any left, might argue that we and our world are the virtual creations of a higher order.

[PL]

Michael Bulley:- In view of the fossil fuel situation, wouldn't "a future world in which no one actually goes anywhere but everyone just moves virtually" be a good thing?

[James Webster]

I agree with the author's Mac issue, I don't seem to get very far with the KMZ download at all with my 1st generation MacBook (which admittedly would struggle to render the 3d anyway given its poor graphics performance).

Regarding navigation, if you are a regular user of Google Earth or other 3d tools you should consider getting a SpaceNavigator '3d mouse' from 3dConnexion http://www.3dconnexion.com it would make the experience much more like walking through the Forum.

Perhaps an overlap of this 3d layer in Google Earth and a PhotoSynth of today's Roman Forum would be good to put things into context.

[Paulo]

Michael, you are not alone, but I am not afraid. The whole thing will collapse quite shortly as a result of some stupidity somewhere - actually I'd like to be associated with that except that it would involve the disappearance of this Website

[Paulo]

There was, several year ago, an attempt by some presumably well-meaning people to present a DVD/Video series on "The History of Warfare", as if there ever was such a history or as if there was anything else. The outcome was a series "The Greek and Persian Wars", "The Gallic Wars", "The Crusades Knights of Christ", which look to me like rehearsals for The Monty Python's Flying Circus (I do not give references because this is definitely not an advertisement). If you want to learn about the ancient world, The Asterix books, and the DVDs are much more educative.

[Michael Bulley]

As you can't go to ancient Rome, I suppose a virtual tour like this may have some use, but I'm beginning to wonder whether, for some people, virtual computer worlds may not have become as real as the real one, or even more real. There was the report the other day of a couple who are getting divorced because the husband's alter-ego had been chatting up another woman in a virtual computer world. During the Olympic Games this year, a computer game was on sale for you to do the events in an imaginary way. Am I being too fearful in imagining a future world in which no one actually goes anywhere but everyone just moves virtually?

[Lusor]

As a collector of game Romes I should mention Pompei (with one i) by The Adventure Company. It's a Myst-style point-and-click based on information provided by the curators of the Pompeii site and credits Florence Dupont, among other contributors. Its educational aspirations are similar to those of SPQR - but there are no people, as in Google Earth. I'd love to know who the intended consumer was.

[Gi]

Is Google Earth Ancient Rome a Pro feature only? I have the free program and cannot download the layer.

Alan, the game SPQR is available to play here: http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/SPQR/GamePage

And there's another 3D Ancient Rome version being built here: http://www.virtualrealityrome.com/
You must download the program and then you can roam the streets of Rome. I haven't visited in a long time but it's nice and peaceful, and you can interact with others.

[Nicholas Wibberley]

It is all very clever, I am sure, but I can’t see the point of it. transcurramus sollertissimas nugas.

[Alan]

I was equally disappointed with Google Earth Ancient Rome. It prompts that question: Is there any point to a virtual ancient Rome for computer, unless you are a gamer? Well, the best virtual Rome came with a game called SPQR about ten years ago. It is a beautiful, detailed, walkable city circa 200 AD, but unfortunately empty of inhabitants. Because the visualization is so good, it makes one yearn for an even better moment, imagined as it must be, in ancient Rome. That moment is not yet to be found, so it is always better to go Rome itself and use your own imagination with the help of scholars like Professor Beard! Get out your history books.

[erik]

Could the mystery temple be a Google-backed assertion of the location of the Temple of Jupiter Stator? Seems like a rather furtive way to close the book on a perennial debate...