Travel across the Roman Empire in real time with ORBIS

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/how-across-the-roman-empire-in-real-time-with-orbis/

by llambda • 14 years ago

48 9 14 years ago

jvrossb2• 14 years ago

Is there something special about Roman times that left us with enough data to build these models or are other eras next?

StuffMaster• 14 years ago

Other eras required border crossings, vastly complicating things.

newbie12• 14 years ago

Roman times were unique. Writing was widespread and the continent-wide infrastructure was without precedent. At the peak of Pax Romana, one could travel generally without protection from southern England to Syria, speaking Latin or perhaps Greek the entire way.

Much of Western civilization has its roots in ancient Rome, (and in turn Rome from Greece) so also I think there's more interest in the period than other places/times.

gus_massa• 14 years ago

The Mongol Empire had a similar period: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica

fuzzythinker• 14 years ago

Thanks didn't know about the word "Pax". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana points to Pax_Mongolica (as gus_massa pointed out) among other Paxes.

eevilspock• 14 years ago

Could build a strategy game on top of this.

jvrossb2• 14 years ago

Exactly what I came back to this page to post after playing around with it a little.

IsaacL• 14 years ago

I've always thought that if I didn't study CS, and if I didn't care at all about mundane concerns like "career prospects", I'd have studied history. And I'm fascinated by projects like this that tie the two together.

Anyone know of any open source projects similar to this that I could contribute to? I'd love to work on something like this is as a side project.

rms25• 14 years ago

" I didn't study CS, and if I didn't care at all about mundane concerns like "career prospects", I'd have studied history." Same here.

Travel across the Roman Empire in real time with ORBIS

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