Just Perfect for Us: Google Map of Ancient Rome
Wednesday November 12, 2008
Google Earth has made possible a vision of Imperial Rome in 320 A.D. (Constantine's time) showing more than 6000 3-D buildings. If you already have Google Earth you'll know it allows you to zoom around to all corners of the earth and see at least the vision from above of distant lands. This new "gallery layer" goes back further. You need to download Google Earth 4.3 and supposedly find the Rome 3-D within the Gallery layer. Unfortunately, my computer seems to be too old for it, so I can't tell you anything more. If you successfully download it, please post your comments about the Google 3-D map of Rome here.
Comments
You have to go under Layers, and then double-click on Gallery, then select Ancient Rome in 3D. It’s pretty cool! I’ve been waiting for something like this!
The model that GoogleEarth is using is Rome Reborn, created at the Intsitute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Its website, which includes various pictures and videos, is http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu. So if you’re having trouble with Google Earth, you can check it out there.
It seems complicated indeed! And I’m usually quiye good at this stuff. Google has to do better!
I seem to be having a computer incompatibility issue.
This worked for me (not so intuitive, but pretty straight-forward) In Google Earth, in the layers section, under gallery, check “Ancient Rome 3D”. If you fly to Rome, you’ll see building and landmark icons. Click any one and a window will open a blurb about the item clicked, but at the bottom of the window will be three links: “Ancient Terrain (**Load First)
As I was saying, 3 links: Ancient Terrain (**Load First)”, “Ancient Roman Landmarks (250 buildings)” and “Ancient Roman Buildings (5000+ buildings)” and “Ancient Roman Buildings (5000+ buildings)” They take a while.
Chris and others: What do you think of it?
Its great. Anyone can use it, of course you must know how to run a computer. Now lets have one for Athens, Luxor and etc.
The other places would be great. Not everyone can use the program, though. It doesn’t work on my out-of-date machine.
You may need to wait a few minutes to allow the data to be downloaded and the buildings painted completely.
Fantastic! Remarkable tool and easy to navigate w/a little practice.
Thanks to Preston for the romereborn link. Good stuff – and a lot of interesting work. I find Google too much trouble even for a map of my neighborhood – so this was perfect.
It’s a piece of cake to use. I have always wondered what a “bird’s eye” view of Ancient Rome would look like. The most helpful feature is giving you the distances and directions between the famous landmarks of the city. It’s amazing.
I was really excited to find this tool. I have played with Google Earth and ArcGis for a while and had a clue how cool it could be. Unfortunately I ran into problems, especially when I went to download the second file “ancient landmarks”. I upgraded, uninstalled, reinstalled and restarted (several times) and tweaked (out the wazoo), it just kept freezing on the download of this (2nd) file. I also downloaded a free program to track ul/dl transactions (Netmeter). The first file was fine, ok try the third file “ancient buildings”, also fine but the second file “ancient landmarks” kept freezing my system no matter what, also the dl speed was negligible (according to NetMeter). Apparently persistence pays. After isolating the problem file as the cause, I persisted in reattempting to dl untill I got a got decent speed, however the dl speed was erratic and took quite awhile to complete. You can tell if the file is still loading by looking at the icon next to the file you are dl’ing ion the left hand screen of Google Earth. Under “places” if it looks like the Eath it is, done, if it looks like balls going in a circle it is dl’ing or stuck. problem solved (I think).