WebProNews

Google has teamed up with Past Perfect Productions, UCLA, and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia to bring Ancient Rome back to life with a new Google Earth layer.

With the Ancient Rome layer, you can:

- View a virtual representation of the city in 320 AD at the height of its development as the capital of the Roman Empire.

- Fly around the city using Google Earth's unique navigation.

- Explore more than 6700 historic buildings.

- Zoom in to discover the detailed interiors of eleven ancient structures including the Colosseum.

- Learn about Ancient Rome through information bubbles written by expert historians.

Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog notes that 11 of the buildings in the layer have viewable interiors. The project is quite an interesting and historical look at a time that we can only read about and imagine (or watch movies like Gladiator...in fact, I kind of want to watch that now).

What Google Earth and its partners are doing shows the potential for a fascinating way of recreating history as we move into the future. Wouldn't it be cool to see any place in known history and virtually navigate through it three-dimensinoally? Ancient Mesopotamia and the beginnings of civilization. The 13 colonies. Very interesting stuff. Almost like virtual-time travel.