When the aspiring graduates of those academies went to Italy to advance their knowledge through first-hand encounters with revered works of art, they were also expected to work from local models and record, on the spot, Roman ruins, picturesque towns and the Italian landscape.
Unlike previous projects at Microsoft and the University of Washington, the team at UNC used a home PC (albeit one with four GPUs) to process millions of images pulled from the Internet and construct 3D models of such landmarks as the Colosseum and the Roman baths at Sagalassos (above).