This video gives the screen capture of a typical session of the Virtual World of Hadrian's Villa. Everything in the video is happening interactively, in real time.

First, the user logs in and chooses an avatar. In the case of the video, we have chosen to be the Emperor Hadrian.

The experience starts in the Temple of the Divine Antinous (Antinoeion) at Hadrian's Villa. The complex was built in the early 130s AD after the death of Hadrian's lover, Antinous. Hadrian was deeply grieved at the loss of his friend and instituted divine honors and cult for the young man all over the empire. Excavators discovered the temple at Hadrian's Villa in 2000, and it was excavated by project consultant, Dr. Zaccaria Mari, from 2000 to 2004.

We see our avatar interact with soldiers of the Praetorian Guard, who are Non Playing Characters (NPCs). Nearby, more NPCs work as gardeners.

In this session, our avatar walks around the sanctuary, passing the Pincian Obelisk (now in Rome), which Mari believes was originally erected in the Antinoeion at the villa. We then proceed to the small chapel dedicated to Antinous, where Mari proposes positioning the 9-foot high statue of Antinous in the guise of Osiris that was found nearby and is now in the Vatican Museums.

As we pass out of the chapel past the two telamones holding up the porch, we automatically receive information from the project's art database about the statues. If we wish, we can easily access the project's website, which provides scholarly documentation for the 3D reconstruction.

We then return toward our point of departure and find that the avatar of a senator is awaiting us. The video ends with a demonstration that--in addition to textual chatting--voice communication is also possible in world between people logged in anywhere around the globe. To achieve this, we use the free software called C3 by Vivox. If we wish, we can make our avatar perform an appropriate gesture of greeting. This and many other gestures were provided by our consultant on Roman gestures, Prof. Anthony Corbeill (University of Kansas) and implemented through motion capture by our technical team.

The Antinoeion is just one of thirty buildings on the site of Hadrian's 200-acre villa near Tivoli. We have modeled the entire villa and put it into the game engine Unity3D. It takes many hours to explore the entire virtual world Unity3D app created for our project by our partners at the IDIA Lab at Ball State University. This video is a short example of what is now possible by way of simulated time travel to a significant cultural monument of the past, and it shows how we can not only visit the lost world but also re-enact historical events and the typical rituals and ceremonies of everyday life.

This project has been generously supported by an anonymous donor and by a grant from the National Science Foundation (grant # IIS-1018512).

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