What was it like - on a personal, sensory level - to live in ancient Pompeii? Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an online model of a house and garden that stood in the much-excavated city in 79 CE will soon give virtual visitors insight into the answer.
Cornell researchers led by co-PIs Caitie Barrett, associate professor of classics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Kathryn Gleason, professor emerita of Landscape Architecture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, have received a $150,000 NEH Digital Humanities Advanced Grant that is enabling them to create a 3D virtual modeling project based on the Casa della Regina Carolina, a large Pompeian house.
With an anticipated launch in spring 2026, the open-access model will allow users to navigate the house and garden. The team ultimately seeks to develop avatars that reflect historically accurate dress and body language and a wide range of embodied features, such as gender, age and degree of bodily ability. Users will choose interactive scenarios, including a dinner party in the living room or work in the garden.
Students from the Cornell Virtual Embodiment Lab will collaborate with students and faculty in a game design program at a French research institution, the Université Catholique de l'Ouest (Laval and Nantes), in partnership with the CNRS laboratory AOrOc in Paris, to create the model. Created with excavation data, LiDAR scanning and integrated 3D Graphic Information Systems, the model give further insight into the ways that people of different genders, ages and physical conditions would have experienced domestic space.
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.
