Explore what Pompeii looked like before catastrophic eruption

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. A little less than 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius became the antihero of the ancient world’s most well-known tragedy. The infamous explosion covered Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic debris, immortalizing the final moments of the ancient Roman cities and some of their unfortunate inhabitants in stunning detail. Now, however, visitors can witness the glory of Pompeii before it all came crashing down in 79 CE. A former game engineer from Illinois and his team have developed an application that brings sites at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii to unprecedented life via Immersive Extended Reality technology. In other words, you can now stand in the forum alongside other ancient Romans and watch in horror as Mount Vesuvius starts to rumble along the horizon. Todd Porter, the former game engineer and now founder of the software company Histoury, went through a different kind of horror to make it happen—walking every inch of the archaeological sites to execute 155 scans under southern Italy’s blazing sun. An idea ahead of its time Porter founded Histoury less than three years ago, but the lightning bolt of inspiration originally struck him 15 years ago on a visit to Herculaneum, Porter tells Popular Science. It was while wandering around the archaeological sites that he had the idea of using his video game background to reconstruct his surroundings in a virtual world one could visit with their phones. Of course, in 2012, smart phones didn’t have enough processing power to support the sort of software required for something like that. “It only took 13 years for phones to catch up to my vision,” Porter jokes. But that vision could only manifest with the Pompeii archaeological park’s consent. Thankfully, a member of the team—a former hotel front desk employee who, after learning about the team’s project, offered to quit his job and do their business development—wouldn’t take no for an answer. He knocked on Pompeii’s door every day until, possibly out of exhaustion, the park agreed to a demonstration. [ Related: DNA reveals new stories about Pompeii’s victims ] The scanner looks like a bomb Histoury’s digital reconstructions start with two different kinds of scans—a high resolution scan and a spatial scan. The high resolution scan creates a virtual 3D model of the site with an accuracy range of less than 2 centimeters, and involves walking around the archaeological site with an instrument called a LiDAR scanner. “That’s just me walking around with a device that looks like a bomb,” Porter says. “It’s shaped like a giant pill with a light whirling around and it makes a noise. You hold it with one hand and you’re looking at your phone with the other.” Todd Porter, the former game engineer and now founder of the software company Histoury, walked around with this scanner capturing every inch of Pompeii. Image: Histoury, Inc. The resulting 3D model is then converted into 3D mesh—essentially a kind of digital model compatible with the game development software they use. Histoury’s artists then build the reconstruction directly on top of this 3D mesh, in consultation with a team of archaeologists to make sure everything is as historically accurate as possible. The other scan—the spatial scan—employs a less powerful instrument called an Xgrid Portalcam, and serves several different purposes. The main one is to secure spatial accuracy. Traditional GPS data is largely inaccurate. Instead, Histoury’s application uses artificial intelligence to determine where the user is standing and which way they are facing within six inches of accuracy. The AI matches the image captured by the smart phone to images of known locations in its data. The other purpose of the spatial scan is to allow artists to double check their work without having to visit Pompeii in person. “We blend the two [scans] in our tool set so that the artist can walk around and they can switch back and forth between their recreation and the real world just to triple check that everything is lined up,” Porter explains. “AI is really sloppy with a lot of things. Music, art, but the stuff that it’s really good at is the stuff we use it for, which is number crunching.” In the final step, the team’s lead AI expert has AI agents that “walk” the entire digital reconstruction, looking in every direction. Simply put, these walk-throughs help check how accurate the spatial aspect of the reconstruction is. “If it’s not accurate at all or less than a certain percentage, it sends the team back to the site for another spatial scan,” Porter explains. “It means we don’t have to send people on site to stand in 5,000 different places to figure out our accuracy,” says Porter. “We can do that virtually.” [ Related: What did Pompeii smell like before it burned? ] A magical project The final product is a smart phone or tablet application, Portyl, that shows what Pompeii would have looked like before Mount Vesuvius’ devastating explosion wherever you point your device. The recreation is populated with people, animals, sound effects, and audio explanations. It’s about as close as you can get to strolling through Pompeii before it was demolished. The reconstructed sites available for virtual tour currently include Pompeii’s amphitheater, large theater, small theater, quadriporticus (a space turned into a gladiator training school), House of the Citharist (a large aristocratic house), forum, and basilica. The team is also working on additional Pompeii locations. Everything is free until September 1, and the app is accessible even for people who aren’t there in person. The amphitheater of Pompeii is one of the oldest Roman amphitheaters in the world. When you download Histoury, you can see what this massive theater would’ve looked like in its prime. Image: Histoury, Inc. But for those who are in Pompeii, “you hold your phone or iPad up, we recognize where you’re standing usually within six inches and we know exactly where you’re facing and then we basically spawn the recreation right there,” Porter says enthusiastically. “Like in the amphitheater, you’re walking around gladiators fighting. There’s 30,000 people in the crowd around you, and you hear the roar, and you hear the clang of the metal. Of all the things I’ve ever done in my life, this is truly one of the most magical things I’ve ever been part of. I think that’s what really gets everybody—it gets you emotionally.” Histoury is close to signing a contract with Herculaneum and making moves in other countries, including Egypt. The complexities of AI in Pompeii This isn’t the first time AI has been put to work at Pompeii. Earlier this year, the archaeological park released an AI-generated video based on archaeological data depicting the final moments of a man whose skeleton was discovered outside of one of Pompeii’s gates. In our article on the subject, we paused to wonder what the victim would have thought about people watching his terrified face to the sound of “Dark Horror Intro” royalty free music. Since Histoury’s Portyl users can trigger the explosion of Mount Vesuvius and then watch it erupt to the sound of screams and the sight of people running for their lives, the question perhaps stands in this case, too. [ Related: AI makes Pompeii victim’s final moments look shockingly real ] But they can also simply peer around the basilica or the amphitheater, and there’s something uniquely respectful about paying tribute to Pompeii’s former glory instead of adoring its tragic remains. And more broadly, there’s no denying the fact that a live reconstruction has the potential to make ancient history feel closer than it has ever been before, especially for people who have a hard time imagining the bygone world on their own. Virgil once wrote, “fugit irreparabile tempus,” meaning “irretrievable time flies.” The ancient poet may have thus been surprised to learn that today, time is indeed retrievable—at least somewhat. 2026 Popular Science Home of the Future Awards 39 products that will improve your everyday life.