Roamin' ruins: a museum film takes visitors through an ancient villa from Pompeii.

One August day in 79 AD, Gains Julius Polybius, a mover and shaker in Roman society, met his match when Mount Vesuvius erupted, heaping eight to ten feet of volcanic ash, cinder, and rock onto his spacious villa, obliterating it and the rest of the resort city of Pompeii. The Polybius house, and the town, lay silent for nearly 2000 years, until they were unearthed in recent centuries. Because Pompeii came to such a sudden end, it serves as a sort of time capsule that tells us much about the daily lives of the ancient Romans. Not only paintings and statues, but loaves of bread and household pets were preserved by the volcanic conditions that visited the town--eerie reminders of how quickly everyday life can come to an end.

It was this idea of showing how things stood directly before the eruption that spurred researchers at the University of Tokyo and the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei in charge of the site to create a virtual reconstruction of a Pompeiian house, and to allow visitors to "tour" the dwelling. Julius Polybius's house was chosen in part because it had been physically reconstructed inaccurately, mostly with an eye toward preserving it from atmospheric decay. By merging not only survey data from the site, but journal entries and sketches made at the time the house was excavated in the 1960s and '70s, researchers hoped to convey a more accurate idea of how the villa would have looked immediately before the volcano blew.

The research teams chose the Italian multimedia specialty firm of Altair 4, which had already created "Ancient Rome Tour," a DVD-ROM with 3D restorations of the city's important ancient monuments, to handle the digital end of the project. Managers Stefano Moretti and Pietro Galifi headed up the effort for Altair 4, which received a variety of data from the researchers, including an archeological survey with plans in 1:50 scale, books, journals, and a series of new photographs taken at the site. "The house had different building phases," says Moretti, "but we chose the last one, which was closest to the eruption." Merging all this information in an accurate way was one of the greatest challenges of the project, he notes.

Three different groups at Altair 4 worked respectively on the modeling of the house, the modeling of the furniture and other objects within, and the textures. Artists used Discreet's 3ds max to model and render the dwelling, Adobe Systems' Photoshop to "paint" the frescos on the walls, and Onyx Computer's Tree Storm, a parametric plant generating program, for the trees in ...