Virtual Roman House

[The Blink 3D version of the Virtual Roman House has been superceded by a new version made with Unity 3D. This new version has the advantage that it can be viewed on PCs, Macs, and Linux machines, provided you have installed the Unity 3D viewer plug-in.]

The Unity 3D world below represents a Roman house of a type known as a domus or atrium house. Though this particular house is an imaginary one, it incorportates elements drawn from various actual Roman houses (for example, the atrium wall decoration imitates that of the House of Sallust in Pompeii).

To enter the 3D environment, click inside the image below. That will load a separate page with the Unity 3D world (if you do not have it, you will be asked to install the Unity 3D plug-in). Once the environment loads, you can move around within the space using the WASD or arrow keys, and you can look around using the mouse.

URL: http://www.medievalist.net/unityworlds/romanhouse.htm

The Blink 3D version is still available here: www.blink3dworld.com/environments/domus.htm

The original version, made with Adobe Atmosphere, is no longer available.

For those who cannot install either of these 3D web viewers, I have posted a YouTube video of the Virtual Roman House here:

For a good on-line introduction to the Roman house, see Barbara McManus' Roman house pages. For a more extensive scholarly treatment of the topic, see The Houses of Roman Italy, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250: Ritual, Space, and Decoration by John R. Clarke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Created by Glenn Gunhouse, Georgia State University, Atlanta.

For more virtual worlds for Art History, see http://www.gsu.edu/~artwgg/atmos.htm