AncientSites, featuring 3-D-rendered walking tours of Rome and Athens (with Babylon, Machu Picchu, and "Nieuw" Amsterdam to follow), hopes to become a kind of GeoCities for the classical scholar set. Debauchery and democracy will roll together into a space where citizen "Heraklia Aelius" can kick back and counsel, "Chill, Diagoras - have some wine."
Developed by Columbia University architecture professors Eden Muir and Rory O'Neill, the site, which goes live today, combines free homepages, bulletin boards, and buddy lists with immersive - and architecturally accurate - renderings of the cities. "We wanted to take an old architectural motif, put people in them, and reawaken the city," says O'Neill.
Perhaps most wisely, the site isn't based on arcana, but action, and wraps the curiosities of a finely-tuned classical mind around instincts of a gamer's soul. The center of the site is parent company CyberSites' Web-based mystery game, S.P.Q.R. (Senatus Populusque Romanus, or "The Senate and People of Rome"), which ran for two years on Pathfinder. A kind of Myst without motion, S.P.Q.R. attracted a wide - and very loyal - community of players, O'Neill says. When the page traffic began to supersede Time Online and members assumed Roman names in the burgeoning bulletin boards, Muir and O'Neill recognizes that they had a commercial property. "A community was forming whether we liked it our not," Muir remembers.
With more than 400 rendered architectural images, the game asks users to solve a Roman murder mystery, and though while not explicitly educational, it provides some "ambient historical knowledge," says O'Neill. S.P.Q.R. is available to play, and the Athens site currently features the first chapter (about 100 screens) of another mystery.
The citizens can also design their own annotated walking tours, using screen shots from the games. A "virtual classroom program" will also be introduced this fall by 100 Latin and history teachers nationwide, using the trivia area to test students.
"These teachers are so thirsty for some technology because they've been working in what's perceived as the most boring area - namely history and Latin," says Muir. Now, he trumpets, students can take the walking tour, "staggering from the tiber to the wine shop."
For O'Neill and Muir, AncientSites represents the culmination of their academic work in architecture. "When you have a party, everyone clusters in the kitchen, because there is something about the closeness of the space that brings people together," says O'Neill. "Spaces are the organizers of people's lives ...[and] our goal is to make the spaces that bring people together."
O'Neill and Muir are old hands at the SoftImage software used for the screen-shot development. While at Columbia, the pair spearheaded the university's drive to create a Digital Design Lab, which now boasts an army of 150 SGI rendering machines. "Before we got there, the school had a handful of Macs, and there wasn't even much of 2-D CAD work going on," recalls O'Neill. "Nobody touches their drawing boards now."
But with communities cropping up all over the net, AncientSites will face pressure to keep people's attention without violating the tenets of the community itself, says Jupiter analyst Steve Mitra. For the Web-based, free communities like Eminds, "they're in the page-view game because they're doing advertising - all they really want is the most amount of people," Mitra says. "That goes completely against the whole idea of creating community."
If micro-niche marketing proves to be the operable business model, O'Neill is optimistic. "The race is on to get certain themes locked down," O'Neill says. "But these are spaces that have held people's interest for 2,000 years, and hopefully we'll have their interest for the next 2,000."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
