Elizabeth Colantoni, associate professor of religion and classics, wanted to visualize ancient Roman topography to explore how the Temple of Jupiter fit within the larger context of Roman society. To do that, she collaborated with others at the University of Rochester to create the virtual reality experience seen here, which provides scholars and students new perspectives and expands scholarly conversation.
The experience is based on a model of the temple that Daniel Weiner ’16 (a dual major in computer science and classics) created as an undergraduate, using a program called Sketch-up. Then, in the fall of 2018, Blair Tinker, the Digital Scholarship Lab’s GIS specialist, built this virtual reconstruction, using combined spatial analysis and 3D modeling in Unity Gaming Engine.