Rome, Digitized

Rome Reborn is a breathtaking project at the University of Virginia in which historians and 3D modelers are attempting the impossible: build a highly detailed, massively comprehensive 3D model of the city of Ancient Rome. It's not just a single model, either. They're intending on building several models representing the state of the Eternal City from 1000 BCE to 550 CE, when the city apparently had some issues. 

 

We encourage you to watch some of the videos of this project, as they provide lengthy fly-throughs of seemingly endless buildings in a gigantic city. You almost get a feel for what it might have been like to wander about the ancient metropolis. 

 

Like any captured 3D data, we're quite interested in using the data for 3D printing. These 3D data sets would offer an astonishing opportunity to produce models of ancient buildings and even neighborhoods. However, as far as we can tell, there is no way to access to the data sets online, which are held by the University of Virginia. 

 

Perhaps they'll release the data when the project completes, but for now we'll settle for printing a Colosseum or two. 

 

Via The University of Virgina

3D Collaboration Puts 700 Year Old Monolith In Your Hands

We've all seen the enigmatic Easter Island monoliths called Moai, erected for mysterious purposes by long departed pacific islanders some 700ish years ago, and we find them quite intriguing. They were also very interesting to Mark Ganter of Open3DP, who wanted to 3D print one.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a readily available dataset containing a 3D scan of a Moai. Ganter searched high and low across the interwebs, and eventually encountered Anthropology Professor Carl Lipo, of the California State University Long Beach Institute for Integrated Research in Materials, Environments and Society (IIRMES) Department of Anthropology Archaeology. Lipo just happened to have such 3D scans - and one of them was stored under a Creative Commons license!

Lipo was surprised to learn of the 3D printing project using his data - and is anxiously awaiting delivery of a sample.

It's amazing what can happen when data is made free. It travels to places where it becomes useful.

Via Open3DP and Evolution Beach