DOMUS R.A. and DOMUS REDUX: Cyber- Archeology extended to Education Alex da Silva Martire LARP – Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia Universidade de São Paulo São Paulo/SP, Brasil alex.martire@usp.br Tatiana Bina LARP – Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia Universidade de São Paulo São Paulo/SP, Brasil tatiana.bina@gmail.com Abstract—This paper presents the development of two applications elaborated by the Laboratory for Roman Provincial Archaeology (LARP-USP) named DOMUS R.A. and DOMUS REDUX: two mobile applications that allow the public to experience an ancient Roman house (domus, in latin) in both Augmented and Virtual Realities environments. Starting from the discussion of our previous application (DOMUS, released in 2013), we describe why we decided to reformulate the original application and how we did it. Finally, we present the educational activities based on DOMUS, DOMUS R.A. and DOMUS REDUX that are now being developed with students and teachers. Keywords—cyber-archaeology; augmented reality; simulation; virtual reality; application I. INTRODUCTION The Laboratory for Roman Provincial Archaeology (LARP) – located in the University of Sao Paulo’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology – developed and released its virtual reality application called DOMUS by the end of 2013. DOMUS consists of a Pompeii-inspired Ancient Roman house that allows the user to navigate through its rooms, visualizing specific information such as the relevance of oil lamps, the religious cults and the local trading production of pottery. The DOMUS application was totally made by archaeologists, representing the pioneering effort of Brazilian researchers in producing the very first cyber-archaeological project in our country. In few words, we can explain Cyber-Archaeology as a dialogue between Archaeology and Virtual Reality. Differently from the 1980’s Virtual Archaeology, the 2000’s Cyber- Archaeology is not a passive process: the user does not only watch a rendered video, listening to the explications about what is seen on the screen – in the cyber-archaeological process, the user is part of the knowledge, being responsible for the development of cognition with the three-dimensional reconstruction. In that way, Cyber-Archaeology is necessarily interactive: it is the result of digital data gathered in the archaeological field, which is next analyzed by archaeologists into immersive environments (such as CAVEs or powerwalls) [1] and made available to the general audience later using less expensive interactive devices (such as smartphones, tablets and personal computers). Cyber-archaeology studies have been conducted since the 2000s, when the archaeologist Maurizio Forte (Duke University) established the main premise of this new area: Cyber-Archaeology, as the name suggests, is fundamentally a cybernetic cycle – it starts with a fieldwork and then continues to data/information collecting, interpretation, evaluation, feedback and, finally, embodiment [2]. One of the most important researches on Cyber-Archaeology today is taking place in Çatalhöyük (Turkey). The Çatalhöyük Research Project, conducted by Ian Hodder and Maurizio Forte, aims to digitally record each step of the archaeological digging. The huge amount of data is studied by the archaeologists at laboratories in order to reconstruct three-dimensionally the results from the fieldwork. II. PREVIOUS WORK The LARP’s DOMUS application was developed aiming the general public, mainly teachers and students. From the study of archaeological remains from Pompeii and Herculaneum, the researches established the major points that could be interesting to work with at classrooms by the teachers. Once chosen, we began the simultaneous process of writing the supporting texts and modeling the ancient domus (house). Being each researcher specialized in a particular Roman aspect, we were able to account for a wide range of subjects (from architecture to economics). For the 3D modeling, Autodesk Maya was used for every object while Unity engine was utilized to develop the interactivity. We opted to mix our texts with 3D objects in order to give complete information on each room that the user can visit in first person point of view. The final application was built for web browsers, being available for Windows and OS X. Figure 1. The DOMUS application running in web browser. 2015 XVII Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality 978-1-4673-7204-6/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SVR.2015.26 133