Modeling the Past Online: Interactive Visualisation of Uncertainty and Phasing

Abstract

This research and educational project aimed to create an interactive website featuring virtual 3-D walkthroughs of three buildings from the ancient city of Marion in Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus. The earliest structure dates from the Cypro-Geometric period (10th–9th century bce) and the latest was destroyed in 312 bce in the early Hellenistic period. The project builds on models presented at EuroMed 2012 and aims to complement a long-term exhibition on Cyprus and presentation on the web. In a joint Computer Science and Art and Archaeology seminar at Princeton University in the spring of 2014, three groups of students created reconstructions and populated them with 3-D scanned objects. Each group proposed a visual metaphor that conveys un-certainty and phasing in these 3-D visualizations and created an online concept for manipulating the models. Scholars and the public can experiment with and learn from these visual recreations that are consistent with archaeological data.