Sensations of Roman life: Reconstructing and experiencing a multi-sensory virtual reality environment.

Roman Britain forms an important part of UK cultural heritage, strongly represented in teaching and museums. However, public perceptions of Roman life are coloured by an emphasis on the gory, glamorous and monumental, creating a skewed impression of the Romans and rendering them a distant society, remote from our lives today. The Sensations of Roman Life project seeks to offer limited redress to this perception by demonstrating in an exciting and innovative way what everyday domestic life was like for a Romano-Briton.

We will use gaming technology to create an immersive 3D virtual reality model (VRM) of a specific Roman town house and neighbourhood, including not only the architectural elements but also sounds and smells that would have been familiar to the occupants. Information to allow us to create this VRM will come from a combination of excavation records of Insula IX, House I, in the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester, near Reading), and classical texts describing the sights, sounds and smells of Roman life. Using the same data, we will also create an Interactive Sensory Map (ISM) that will graphically represent (with colours and concentric lines) the intensity and dispersal of sounds and smells through and around House I. This will be produced by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) which overlays different forms of data onto a common map (in our case the neighbourhood of Insula IX), allowing the user to vary elements such as wind direction, time of day, open/closed windows etc.

This is important and relevant research because the use of these technologies is becoming more widespread in the design and representation of the built environment. At the School of Construction Management and Engineering, Reading (SCME), we have a track record of using immersive Virtual Reality to collaborate with construction professionals, recently for example in the design of a hospital. Without sounds and smells in these representations, we get a false impression of the effects of entering that space (e.g. hospital smells are highly evocative). Tools such as the ISM also open up the possibility for designing sounds and smells into a building, to assist with direction-finding for instance. At present such tools are not available in the construction sector.

Furthermore, our understanding of the past is primarily coloured by material remains. Sounds and smells form little part of the archaeologist's toolkit, so that excavations inherently focus on those places where activities have left the greatest trace. Excavation strategies and subsequent explanations therefore do not adequately account for issues such as quietness, or disgusting smells. This research will interrogate our understanding of the past by offering a multi-sensory representation of disappeared environments. In doing so we will specifically aim to counter the public misunderstanding of the Roman world as one dominated by military might or imperial glory, and instead show that life was interesting in noisy, smelly ways.

Having gathered archaeological and textual data, identified key sounds and smells, and established the architecture of House I, we will create our VRM in a gaming engine, and our ISM in a GIS map and demonstrate them at Chedworth Roman Villa. We expect several hundred visitors to experience the models over a two week period, including schools and knowledgeable scholars, giving our research maximum exposure and satisfying our aim to promote greater public understanding of everyday Roman life. There will then be two public lectures at Chedworth to explain in more detail the methods and findings of the research project. We will also arrange a presentation to senior figures in the construction sector, drawing on the extensive contacts in SCME, where we will demonstrate the potential for the multi-sensory approach in designing the future built environment, and discuss knowledge exchange activities to develop these models into useful design tools.

The Sensations of Roman Life project will have two key non-academic beneficiaries. The first is those involved in activities related to the display and teaching of Roman life, and the second is designers and users of new buildings, especially large public buildings.

Roman Britain forms an important part of our cultural heritage and is strongly represented in schools, museums, and sites with standing remains. However, public perceptions of Roman life are coloured by an emphasis on the glamorous and monumental, creating a skewed impression of the Romans and rendering them a distant society, remote from our lives today. Institutions such as the National Trust are attempting to re-balance this by demonstrating Roman craftsmanship and displaying a wide range of Roman objects set within the context of their everyday use. By choosing as our case study a relatively ordinary Roman town-house we will be able to bring to the fore the Roman sensations of everyday life, making this accessible to a modern audience.

We have partnered with the National Trust at Chedworth Roman Villa to demonstrate the Virtual Reality multi-sensory model (VRM) to their visiting publics, which will help in our efforts to change public perceptions of the ancient world. Chedworth have a good flow of school groups, who they suggest will be particularly impressed with this type of game-based technology, and we expect the teachers will be influenced by this novel portrayal of Roman life in their future teaching practices. As well as the exhibition at Chedworth, manned by IE for a two week period, there will also be two public lectures there intended to give a more detailed description of the methods and outputs of the project. This will be promoted by Chedworth to their supporters, volunteers and regular visitors, and by the project investigators through our contacts in the archaeological community, including a large number of regional societies populated with enthusiastic members of the public and knowledgeable amateur scholars. We will also use extensive personal contacts in the museum world to invite attendance at the lectures and/or the demonstrations, where the idea of a virtual representation of a specific environment will encourage ideas for future exhibitions in other institutions.

The construction sector has been experimenting with the use of immersive models for many years, with several design and visualisation projects carried out at Reading, met with an enthusiastic response. This has two primary benefits: first, it allows the design of a building to be examined and changed prior to physical construction, and second it gives a platform for lay-people to engage with the design team. This project will expand on those benefits and allow a more informed approach to the design process. For example, in designing a new hospital ward, architects and clinicians attended a joint demonstration of a visual Virtual Reality Model (VRM) for a discussion about sightlines to patient beds. This could now be expanded to include a model of the flow of sounds and smells through the ward, experienced with a degree of realism in the VRM, and simulated through the Interactive Sensory Map (ISM), allowing changes such as closing a door and opening a window. This type of modelling is not currently available, and while the ISM produced in this project will be simple, it will demonstrate the principle, and offer an additional tool for designers, builders and users of environments, for instance in designing multi-sensory path-finding. IE will organise an industry demonstration, using the contacts at SCME to bring in a range of influential construction industry professionals to experience the tools we develop. Our experience of the use of Virtual Reality modelling to date suggests that use in architecture and construction is set to expand, and new tools that assist in designing buildings will be enthusiastically welcomed, and likely to be part of future design processes.