No longer just the realm of the computer gamer, visualisations are now part of academic teaching and cultural interpretation, writes Karlin Lillington.

IT'S 55 BC, and the toga-clad visitor is walking across the monumental stage in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome, admiring the massive marble columns and looking out over tiers of tens of thousands of seats.

Then, click! Two millenniums later, the same visitor inspects the modular, modernist stage designs of Swiss director and designer Adolphe Appia in the theatre at Hellerau in Germany.

Also on the itinerary, should the visitor choose, are Inigo Jones's 17th-century surgical lecturing hall, Wordsworth's Dove Cottage or an Iron Age village in Coventry, all thanks to the extraordinary digital time travelling that is the business - literally - of a small computing group at King's College, London.

These highly detailed and realistic three-dimensional visualisations are the work of King's Visualisation Lab, which operates in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at the college. No longer just the realm of the computer gamer, such environments are becoming a firm part of academic teaching and research, and of cultural interpretation.

"What we're talking about is a shift in academic methodologies," says Hugh Denard, associate director of the visualisation lab and convenor of an MA degree in digital culture and technology, who spoke recently as part of the Long Room Hub lecture series at Trinity College, his alma mater.

A professional theatre historian without a computing background, Denard and another arts academic colleague work with two computer scientists to create two- and three-dimensional visuals for teaching, archaeological research, websites, architecture, television programmes and museum installations.

"We've undertaken some fairly major research projects," he says. One of their biggest is an ongoing highly detailed reconstruction of the Theatre of Pompey in Rome, built by the general to celebrate his triumphs on three continents.

The 3D tour of the theatre gives a firm sense of its astonishing scale.

"Its stage was as wide as a modern football field is long," notes Denard, and was the size of modern sports stadiums. It covered a huge area on which 150 individual buildings were built over time. Yet the acoustic perfection of the theatre allowed an audience of some 30,000 to watch ancient dramas presented by actors who must have seemed dwarfed on the massive stage.

The viewer can experience a sense of what it must have been like to sit in the audience and also to tread the stage, as the visualisation allows the user to explore both these perspectives. In addition, the group has used filmed actors and blue screen techniques to place live action right on stage - a quite disconcertingly real theatrical sensation.

Denard feels it is just these diverse experiences that make 3D graphics and the latest computing technologies an ideal teaching and learning format, specially for a subject like theatre, which takes place in time and space and can now be studied in that context, he says.

He has been involved in projects such as Theatron (www.theatron.org), an online 3D archive of 15 European theatres with historical significance, and created installations for the Theatre Museum in London, and Dove Cottage in the Lake District.

More recently, Denard has been developing a pedagogical environment within the online virtual reality world of Second Life.

They have already brought in the Tower of London, several theatres and the Leaning Tower of Pisa - without quite yet having figured out the graphics to make it actually lean. Some 20 historical theatres will be available for study and exploration by students and other visitors.

On a recent visit, a partially constructed Globe Theatre hung in the sky, awaiting relocation to their section of Second Life. Denard notes with some glee that the lab had recently received funding from the college to purchase its own island in Second Life, which will be used for teaching.

The visualisation lab team initially began working on theatre- oriented projects at Warwick University, where they survived by moving from grant to grant on projects. "We had to work quite hard to make sure [ that] as one project was ending, we had another coming in," recalls Denard.

It "was not a sustainable model", he says, and the team began to look for an academic environment in which the unit would be given base funding.

They moved to King's College in London in 2005 and "this has made all the difference. It has allowed us to develop a more strategic and commercial direction for the institution," he says.

Now, all the lab members are salaried and projects can be solicited without the immediate pressure of holding the unit together.

The lab has unique expertise, coming from an academic environment with both arts and humanities and computer science expertise on board.

He acknowledges this form of pedagogy doesn't sit easily with everyone.

"There's a divide between the old fogey historians and the cool art dudes," he jokes during a lecture to an audience clearly including some old fogey historians. But - as an entranced audience indicated - show them the 3D visualisations and they are largely sold on the concept.

He adds: "These are very important tools that enable us to do things in academia that no other tool can do."

One of their biggest projects is a highly detailed reconstruction of the Theatre of Pompey, built by a general to celebrate his triumphs on three continents