Date of Graduation

5-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Computer Science and Computer Engineering

Advisor/Mentor

Gauch, John

Committee Member/Reader

Fredrick, David

Committee Member/Second Reader

Patitz, Matthew

Committee Member/Third Reader

Panda, Brajendra

Abstract

It is fair to say that Pompeii is the most studied archaeological site in the world. Beyond the extensive remains of the city itself, the timing of its rediscovery and excavation place it in a unique historiographical position. The city has been continuously studied since the 18th century, with historians and archaeologists constantly reevaluating older sources as our knowledge of the ancient world expands. While several studies have approached the city from a data driven perspective, no studies of the city have taken a quantitative holistic approach on the scale of the VR Pompeii project. Hyper-specificity has been the order of the day, leaving our knowledge of the city structure incomplete. The VR Pompeii project at the University of Arkansas aims to address this by performing, in concert, topographical network analysis of houses and neighborhoods, convolutional neural network identification and categorization of wall images, and analysis of space usage through subject tracking and electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Coordination of this data to maintain search-ability for non-technical scholars is a major challenge. To this end, the purpose of this research has been to design and then implement a database that allows for all of the VR Pompeii project data to be accessed together, with room for expansion, while maintaining a simple user interface to empower non technical users to ask questions that no researcher has been able to ask about the ancient city of Pompeii.

Keywords

Pompeii, archaeology, database, mysql, virtual reality

Share

COinS