One thing that archaeologists really like to do is to find ways to reconstruct their sites so they'd be the way they were thousands of years ago. At the University of Arizona, we have something called AZ-LIVE, and it's a big black box, a huge box, in which we can see, we can experience our sites by inserting them into this, reconstructing them. And then walking through them as if it's a kind of virtual reality. But rather than have me explain this, let's go to an expert. Cynthia Hart works for AZ-LIVE at the University of Arizona, and she has been working with and experiencing our unpronounceable site of Chianciano Terme in southern Tuscany. Watch. [MUSIC] >> We are in what we call AZ-LIVE, which is what's referred to as an immersive environment. As a data visualization specialist, it's my job to literally help researchers visualize their data in new ways. And being in an immersive environment allows us to project in 3D a scientist's data and allow them to walk through it. My name is Cynthia Hart. I have a pretty broad science background in physics and environmental science, and some computing, programming. So this system is what's known as a cave, and our particular cave has four walls, three walls and a floor. There's a projector that corresponds to each wall. Those projectors go through our rendering machine, which has two high-powered graphics cards. So there's two projectors per card. That machine speaks to the control computer, which drives this whole system. Another part of this system that's very crucial is our tracking system. When someone is working with the system in the immersive mode, they wear a head tracking device along with the 3D glasses to enable them to see in 3D. So however they move their head, the scene responds. And the projectors all synchronize with each other so that everything moves along seamlessly across from one wall to the other as you move. [MUSIC] We also have a wand that's trackable, where you can point at objects. It kind of acts like a laser pointer. In some of the demos you can grab objects, you can move them, you can zoom up on them, and so forth. I am walking between the buildings here at Chianciano, and I'm looking for the bats. As I understand this project, David Soren went to the site in Chianciano Italy, where there was an archaeological dig. And they were able to understand how the structures at this site of the baths were put together. And they provided their data to an artist, who built a model in some computing platform or other, provided it to our lab. And then we tweak that model to work with our system so that we can project it in 3D and give that user experience of walking through it and seeing how the buildings were related to each other. Well, I feel like I'm in a hallway, which, essentially, in virtual reality space, I am in a hallway. And I'm looking at this nice tilework on the floor. So we are in a reproduction of the bath area of this site, and you can see water in the background there, which looks a little murky. It's not rendered as blue, but you can see the reflection of the columns in the water surface back there. Chianciano was known for its baths. So this was considered a very special place, that the water, especially, had therapeutic properties. The texturing of surfaces in a system like this is a big part of making a model look realistic. And I believe that's part of what they worked very hard on this model, to make the textures on the walls and on the stone look continuous and look realistic, and model what they believed were the actual materials used at the time. Being able to get a sense for how this site felt when there were buildings actually there, I mean, obviously it's just a model, it doesn't look 100% real, but you can get a sense of scale and how people might have moved through that. That I think you wouldn't get from just being on the ground and seeing the site with the buildings no longer standing. That has a very different feel to it. So I think it can be used, also, to make learning about a particular site kind of portable. You can send the data model to someone if they have the right equipment to project it, and they can walk through it. Whereas it might be a lot harder to get a plane ticket, and go to the actual site and see that. A project like this requires a team of people, someone who has the data that they want to have represented, an artist who knows how to use the right software tools to put that together in a model. And then, in the case of an immersive environment like this, someone who can take that model, convert it to the right formats that work with a given hardware suite that provides this kind of experience. [MUSIC] Getting an idea how people lived their lives, or how they used these baths back in a time that no longer exists. Not only are the buildings no longer standing, but the topography is different. I think if you wander through the entire model here, which isn't just the baths, there are several buildings, you can really understand how people use this site in a way that you couldn't, I believe, just by looking at a 2D representation. [MUSIC]