Week 9: 3D Modeling- History and the Sims

I was very interested in the development of three-dimensional simulations. At UCLA, the development of the utilization of digital technologies was focused on the historical simulation of Ancient Rome. Unlike Google Earth, which we examined last week, these virtual simulations had to be created completely from scratch because no one has photographs or videos of Ancient Rome, like they do of the modern Earth. Although some sub-par creations were made first, the author says that they had to make serious changes to the original model to make it more accurate and user-friendly. The first phase of this makeover was the formation, data aggregation and interrogation of process. Firstly, this was difficult because people wanted to watch the projections like a movie but the scholars were more focused on accuracy than entertainment. With accuracy they focused on making the quality of the images uniform, and then even trying to make the buildings accurate in terms of both size and time. The second phase was the geo-temporal interrogation and increased kinetic experimentation. This meant continuing to build upon what had already been created and making it accessible for other scholars to join in as well.

Reading this article, I was so impressed by how recently all of these programs had been created. Looking at the images in the article, I was reminded of some of the buildings I had created while playing Sims when I was younger. The Sims game is a popular computer game, in which the player can essentially create a virtual reality. In my Sims games I would not only create people, but also create houses, parks, and whole towns. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this software, that was so readily accessible to me, had made it possible for me to create a 3 dimensional world. Although I had not been thinking about these towns in the historical sense, I realize now that with this software I could have created my own, somewhat inaccurate, Roman town, or any other time period for that matter.

With this realization, I now wonder which aspect of the 3-D modeling was utilized first. I wonder if the technology was first used for commercial purposes or educational purposes. This means, for example, whether these games were created in the model of programs created for historical purposes like this one, or the idea for historical models came from the ideas of computer games.the-sims-4-build-mode-house-2jpg-9589a6_1280w