Interview with Bernard Frischer, Founder of Flyover Zone, and Nathanael Tavares, CEO of Flyover Zone
February 18, 2021
No Comments
Questions for Email Interviews with Bernard & Nathanael, 2021By TammyJo
Flyover Zone
See cultural heritage sites and monuments all over the world from the comfort of your home or classroom. Our company is a pioneer in the new industry of virtual tourism, or what we call “teletourism.” We create digital applications offering students and the general public tours of cultural heritage sites. Take one of our teletours™ on your own, exploring the stops on the site wherever your curiosity leads you. Along the way, you can pause and listen to experts explain what you are seeing.
Our products fall into three categories:
- Reborns concentrate on time travel taking you back in time to see ancient places as they originally looked. This virtual time travel is possible because our talented graphic artists work with subject experts to make digital recreations of the sites and monuments of the past.
Available now: Rome Reborn®. For more about this line of teletours, including its history stretching back to the 1990s, click here. We express our heartfelt thanks to all those who contributed to creating Rome Reborn when it started as an academic project owned by the Regents of the University of California under development in the period 1996 to 2007. For details, click here. To avoid any confusion, we note that all the 3D models used to illustrate Rome Reborn’s teletours were created from 2008 to 2019 by our company, which holds the copyright. They are different from the Rome models owned by the University of California.
Also available now: Hadrian’s Villa Reborn™. Take a virtual visit to this great government retreat east of Rome at Tivoli. It was commissioned by Hadrian, who ruled the Roman Empire in the second century CE. Flyover takes you to see the South Theater on private land not open to the public. Another tour presents the Stadium Garden, now reduced to a grassy field but once an elegant entertainment complex complete with the villa’s only known sculpture gallery.
Coming soon: Athens Reborn™, Baalbek Reborn™, Egypt Reborn™. - Great Monuments™ present cultural heritage sites that are well preserved, so they do not need to be reconstructed digitally.
Coming soon: Casino dell’Aurora in Rome. - Historical Games™ allow you to play the role of ancients such as gladiators and chariot racers. First, we give you training in the rules of the competition and in the use of the equipment. Then, you can apply your training and try to rise from novice to expert level.
Available now: Chariot Racing! Learn how to drive a four-horse chariot and compete in the Circus Maximus, ancient Rome’s great race track.
Our products are easy to use. Each begins with a tutorial that takes under one minute. Once you’ve finished the tutorial, you can use what you’ve learned in all our products. They all have the same interface. They run on cell phones, tablets, laptops, PCs, and VR headsets. Whichever device you use, the tour is the same. If you are sharing your experience with another user, that user can see what you are seeing and talk back and forth with you even if you are both using different devices.
All our products are available in English, and some also offer other languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, and Italian.
For details about the teletours currently available and those soon to be published, see our Products page.
Meet Our Team Leaders
Bernard Frischer
Founder
Bernard Frischer is a digital archaeologist who writes about virtual heritage, Classics, and the survival of the Classical world. He has been a professor at UCLA (1976-2004), the University of Virginia (2004-2013) and Indiana University (since 2013).
From 1996 to 2004 he was founding director of the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory. The lab was one of the first in the world to use 3D computer modeling to reconstruct cultural heritage sites. In 2008, he founded the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, which was at first based at the University of Virginia and then in 2013 moved to Indiana University, where it is still active today.
Nathanael Tavares
CEO
Nathanael Tavares is a computer scientist who worked at the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology, housed in the Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, developing several virtual reality experiences. Afterwards, he went on to work for three years with a new cutting-edge sports replay technology, Intel® True View.
He joined Flyover Zone in 2016 as a software developer and was named our CEO in 2018. A graduate of Indiana University, he is a native of Bloomington, Indiana.
Mohamed Abdelaziz
Art Director
Mohamed Abdelaziz is an archaeologist and graphic artist. Born and educated in Alexandria, Egypt, he has degrees in Archaeology. He has worked as an archaeologist and digital artist for the Ministry of Egyptian Tourism and Antiquities, the Centre d’etudes Alexandrines, Indiana University, and Harvard University. Since 2019 he has served as Art Director of Flyover Zone.
Lasha Tskhondia
Director of 3D Modeling
Lasha Tskhondia is a professional sculptor and 3D modeler. Born and educated in Tbilisi, Georgia, he started his career as a sculptor of miniatures. From 1998 to 2016 he collaborated with American companies making small sculptural models of extinct animals, paleontological and anthropological scale replicas of skulls, as well as military miniatures. He has long been fascinated by the history and architecture of ancient Rome. After making models of Roman buildings for ten years as a hobby, he joined the Flyover Zone team in 2016 and was recently named our Director of 3D Modeling.
What Our Teletourists Have to Say
Our company is a pioneer in the new industry of teletourism.
First, there was teleconferencing, then telecommuting and telemedicine, now Flyover Zone brings you virtual tourism, or what we call “teletourism.”
Teletourism makes it possible to see the great cultural heritage sites of the world from the comfort of your living room or classroom. Arguably, you can learn and see more on a teletour than is possible on a real tour of places like Rome. Flyover Zone not only takes you to the site as it appears today but also turns back the clock to show you the way it looked hundreds or thousands of years ago. We take you into the air to get a bird’s eye view and put what you are visiting into a broader geographical context. We take you to places on the ground and even underground that are not open to the public.
All along the way, you can listen to expert explanations of what you are seeing. If you miss something, you can rewind the audio and listen again.
Of course, a teletour is not just an affordable alternative to a real tour. A teletour can also prepare you for a trip so you get the most out of it once you arrive at your destination.It can deepen your understanding of what you have seen after you return home. If you put our teletours on your smartphone, you can even use them to give yourself self-guided tours once you arrive at your destination.
For more about the role of teletourism during and after the coronavirus pandemic, click here to watch a talk by our Founder and President Bernard Frischer.