Welcome to the Project
Note: If you are visiting this site to see the competition results please click here!
This is a year-long project that started in October 2008, to build a virtual 3D model in Second Life of the Pompeii Court of the Sydenham Crystal Palace. It is funded by JISC as part of their ‘Enriching Digital Resources’ theme, a strand of their ‘Digitisation’ programme. The Pompeii Court was a complete life-size model of an ancient Roman house, housing a collection of copies of Roman paintings. The house and the paintings were based on the ruins preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in the Roman town of Pompeii. It was built in 1854 as part of the Fine Arts Court in the Crystal Palace in South London and it was destroyed when the Palace burnt down in 1936.
The aim of our project is to build a digitised collection of the material that was in the Pompeii Court and to create an interactive online space to house it. Visitors will be able to tour the Court and interact with us, other visitors and the objects on display. We want to compare how the social and educational experiences offered by our Model compare with the successes and failures of the original Court, which itself was a Victorian experiment in education and reconstruction.
On this site you can find information about all the aspects of the project and we’ll be adding more as the project progresses. We’re also keeping a blog, recording each step of the way.
If you have any suggestions, questions or material that might be useful in the collection, please do leave a reply below. Throughout the year, we’ll be posting questionnaires and asking for feedback. We look forward to hearing from you.
Shelley & Nic
April 30, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Hi,
It might be an idea to gather up as many pictures of the Pompeiian House as possible, including the 2 in colour. I could check all the ones I have, but the problem is: some rooms were never photographed because of the poor lighting.
Regards,
Giles
May 1, 2009 at 11:26 am
Hi Giles,
Thanks so much for leaving a comment.
Yes, the rear of the house is a nightmare to recreate – from the guidebooks, we have a good idea of the colour schemes and we’ve identified the majority of the panel paintings from written descriptions so we can replicate those. But the detail of the decorative schemes is lost.
The other slight difficulty is, of course, that a lot of the better photographs are of the Buckland overhaul and it’s clear that a few alterations (mainly simplifications of the complicated decorative patterns) occurred at that time.
We have gathered a library of images which we’d love to post online, Unfortunately, worries about copyright issues mean that we’re wary of putting them all up and so we’re compiling a list of links to other websites and databases. Where we have images for which we have express permission to use digitally or do not have copyright implications (images from the Illustrated London News etc), these will be on display in Second Life. We should get a move on uploading onto the website so that everybody can access them, I think. That way it’d be a lot easier for us all to share our resources. I’ll get onto this.
It would be absolutely fantastic to see the images you have.
Shelley
May 21, 2009 at 1:46 am
Nice website I will come back again soon.