A story I missed: A virtual-reality app is transporting people back to Jerusalem in the First Century.
Here’s a screenshot from the app:
Just kidding. That was not around until the end of the 7th century.
(This is virtual realty, not warped reality, after all)
But the Second Jewish Temple is there.
A virtual-reality app is transporting people back to Jerusalem under Roman rule in the first century.
The programme includes a 3D virtual tour of the area around Jerusalem’s Western wall where the ancient walls of the city’s Temple Mount can still be seen.
The programme, ‘Lithodomos VR’ is an android app that was developed by Simon Young, an archaeology doctoral student at the University of Melbourne.
Visitors can use the VR headset to transport themselves to the ancient city when it was newly built under Herod I who was king of Judea from 74 BC- 4 BC.
The app was launched in December 2016 and costs $1.99 (£1.59) on Google Play, and $2.99 (£2.39) in the Apple App Store.
The reconstruction of the first-century city is in line with the most recent archaeological evidence and will be updated as new evidence comes to light, Mr Young told Live Science.
‘The VR content that we are deploying on the app is the result of carefully researched material from archaeological excavations, site plans, elevation drawings, photographs of textures and [geographic information system] mapping, as well as topographical data from Nasa’s ASTER digital elevation models’, he said.
‘So all the content is linked in to the real world’, he said.
So it is based on actual archaeological evidence. Note also that the inventor, Simon Young, does not seem to be Jewish – just an expert in his field.
Perhaps UNRWA should purchase the app for palestinian schools, so the kids get educated in true history. Yeah, not going to happen.
