The computer has become an indispensable tool in modern archeology for measuring, recording, organizing, searching, discussing, and presenting results. Particularly important is the use of realistic and interactive 3D graphics technology: It allows to accurately capture and present the archaeological evidence within its current 3D environment as well as to create 3D models of the historic location itself. Different possible reconstructions can be discussed and compared to the existing evidence within the same model, thus allowing to better evaluate scientific hypotheses. Given such interactive 3D models, we can then apply a multitude of other simulation techniques from computer graphics and other fields (e.g., illumination, acoustic and architectural simulations) to try to recreate the historic reality. Using the Internet, we can interconnect research groups on different locations but also make this data widely available and more accessible to non-experts.

In this paper we present the ISReal project together with its first results which allows for dynamically create, large-scale, and physically realistic simulated realities with systematic semantic annotations.