September 30, 2025
VR environment for the course "In search of the Masses in Antiquity"
This is a 3D model of a part of Rome, produced for the course "In Search of the Masses in Antiquity". Includes some crowds and a procession, to enable a crowd perspective and reflect on specific hypotheses and reconstructions. The model was created by the 4D Research Lab of the University of Amsterdam for the project 'Virtual Past Places', in collaboration with course teacher Danielle Slootjes. The emulated situation is the triumph of the Bellum Judaicum. For this situation, compare the account of Flavius Josephus and other historical and iconographic accounts of this event with actual space. Bringing this into 3D space allows students to have more input available than through the historical texts and imagery: the line of sights, spatiality and awareness of being in a crowd, watching a triumph. A fictional central area gives entry to the two scenes. This model is accessible as a VR room using Hubs Cloud software (virtualplaces-uva.eu). For reproducability and reuse, consult the manual at https://doi.org/10.21942/uva.30490373 and follow the instructions to set up your own Hubs Cloud instance. For the relevant dataset, please use the link to the Zenodo deposition. Funding and context Virtual Past Places has been made possible by a grant, the 'Stimuleringsregeling Online Onderwijs' from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap, OCW), coordinated by SURF, the cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions. Virtual Past Places includes open access publication of all developed teaching materials as Open Educational Resources, the development of training materials, and the organisation of inspiration and counselling sessions for peers. In case you're interested in the results of this research project, and/or participate in it, please contact J.Waagen@uva.nl.
Daniëlle Slootjes, Tijm Lanjouw, Mikko Kriek, Jitte Waagen, Markus Stoffer