A case study of a virtual audience in a reconstruction of an ancient Roman odeon in Aphrodisias

Abstract

The benefits of including virtual humans into cultural heritage reconstructions are twofold: the realism of architectural models is increased by populating them; and, as well, it allows to preserve the intangible heritage describing how people in historical times behaved. We present a case study, where we create an interactive real-time scenario of a virtual audience in an ancient Roman odeon in Aphrodisias. Based on historical sources, we reconstruct both the building and the people. Inhabited virtual heritage applications require careful balancing of computational resources between the visualization of environment and the visualization of people. We describe several techniques that allow us to achieve high visual quality for a large number of virtual humans rendered together with a complex architectural model while still keeping interactive framerates. An important part of the heritage recontruction is the authoring, we propose a comprehensive framework for authoring of crowd scenarios.