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

罗马时代的不列颠是英国文化遗产的重要组成部分，在教学和博物馆中都有很强的代表性。然而，公众对罗马生活的看法被强调血腥，迷人和不朽的色彩所影响，造成了对罗马人的扭曲印象，使他们成为一个遥远的社会，远离我们今天的生活。“罗马生活的感觉”项目试图通过一种令人兴奋和创新的方式展示罗马-英国人的日常家庭生活，为这种看法提供有限的纠正。我们将使用游戏技术来创建一个沉浸式3D虚拟现实模型（VRM）的特定罗马联排别墅和社区，不仅包括建筑元素，还包括居住者熟悉的声音和气味。使我们能够创建这个VRM的信息将来自罗马城镇Calleva Atrebatum（西尔切斯特，雷丁附近）的第IX号屋的挖掘记录，以及描述罗马生活的景象，声音和气味的经典文本。使用相同的数据，我们还将创建一个交互式感官地图（ISM），该地图将图形化地表示（用颜色和同心线）声音和气味的强度和分布，并通过地理信息系统（GIS）将不同形式的数据叠加到一个共同的地图上（在我们的例子中是Insula IX附近），允许用户改变风向，时间，这是一项重要而相关的研究，因为这些技术在建筑环境的设计和表现中越来越广泛地使用。在雷丁建筑管理与工程学院（SCME），我们有使用沉浸式虚拟现实与建筑专业人员合作的记录，例如最近在医院的设计中。在这些表征中没有声音和气味，我们就会对进入该空间的效果产生错误的印象（例如，医院的气味具有很强的唤起性）。像ISM这样的工具也为在建筑中设计声音和气味提供了可能性，例如帮助寻找方向。目前，建筑部门还没有这种工具。此外，我们对过去的理解主要受到物质遗迹的影响。声音和气味只是考古学家工具箱中的一小部分，因此，挖掘工作本质上集中在那些活动留下最大痕迹的地方。因此，挖掘策略和随后的解释并不能充分解释诸如安静或令人作呕的气味等问题。这项研究将通过提供对消失环境的多感官再现来质疑我们对过去的理解。在这样做的过程中，我们将特别致力于反驳公众对罗马世界的误解，即罗马世界是一个由军事力量或帝国荣耀主导的世界，相反，我们将展示生活在嘈杂、难闻的方式中是有趣的。收集了考古和文本数据，识别了关键的声音和气味，并建立了House I的架构，我们将在游戏引擎中创建VRM，在GIS地图中创建ISM，并在Chedworth Roman Villa展示它们。我们希望有数百名参观者在两周的时间里体验这些模型，其中包括学校和知识渊博的学者，这将使我们的研究得到最大程度的曝光，并满足我们促进公众对罗马日常生活更深入了解的目标。然后将在切德沃思举行两次公开讲座，详细解释研究项目的方法和发现。我们亦会安排一个讲座给建造业的资深人士，利用在土木工程及机械工程委员会的广泛联系，展示多感官方法在设计未来建筑环境的潜力，并讨论知识交流活动，将这些模型发展成有用的设计工具。

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.