Group takes a 'virtual' tour

On Friday night, students and faculty at the University had an opportunity to travel back in time and across seas to the Roman Empire. In one hour, more than 50 professors and students "toured" the Forum built under the emperor Trajan -- a more than 200,000-square-foot civic square which stood as a symbol of the power of imperial Rome until the building's collapse more than 300 years after the fall of the Roman Empire. But the tourists paid no airfare and carried no passports for this trip -- in fact, they did not even leave campus. James Packer, professor of Roman architecture and archaeology at Northwestern University, and William Jepson, director of computing in the department of architecture and urban design at the University of California at Los Angeles, led students and faculty on a virtual reality tour of the Forum of Trajan. Their presentation -- sponsored by the Classical Studies Department and held in the Chemistry Building -- was entitled "Restoring Trajan's Forum: A Three-Dimensional Approach for the Early 21st Century." Using a $250,000 virtual reality machine, Jepson presented his model of the Forum of Trajan based on Packer's architectural drawings. The machine -- which displays 30 images per second -- allows users to "walk through" and experience the forum as it might have appeared in 114 A.D. According to Classical Studies lecturer Paul Scotton, "it [the project] is state of the art scholarship." Jepson and Packer, who has had a number of books and articles published on the Forum project, began to collaborate early in 1997. However, Packer first began to lay the foundations of this project in 1972, after leading a Northwestern alumni tour of the ruins of the Roman Empire one year earlier. Seeing that the site had never been studied conclusively, Packer -- after receiving a grant from the National Endowment of Humanities to spend six months in Rome to study the site -- launched his plans for the "reconstruction" of the Forum of Trajan. To shape his reconstruction on paper, Packer studied essays from archives and libraries in Rome, Paris and Munich, and consulted with teams of archaeologists, architects, computer scientists and photographers. The product of decades of excavations, research and deliberation is a three-dimensional, interactive, intricately-detailed model of the Forum of Trajan. "The Trajan Forum has not been viewed in such a way since the beginning of the 9th century A.D.," Packer said, noting that the project was funded by a number of institutions, including the Los Angeles-based J. Paul Getty Trust, a foundation dedicated to interdisciplinary scholarship in the visual arts and humanities. "I have? looked into Trajan's Forum, and it is truly impossible to [mentally] reconstruct the way it really looked," said Sarah Kupperberg, a post-baccalaureate student in the Classical Studies Department. "If nothing else, [the program] shows how useful computer technology really is. It's fascinating."

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