Fort Townshend
Virtually re-built: Creating a virtual reality model of Fort Townshend
Under contract to the Heritage
Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador the geographic information
sciences laboratory at Memorial University, Newfoundland undertook
the task of creating an exhibit that would allow visitors to see Fort
Townshend in a new way. The proposal was to create a set of
animations showing the fort at several stages of development and
decline, with the city represented in less detail to provide context
to the scenes.
In order to create the fly through animations virtual reality models
were built for each of the time periods and then sequences of images
were rendered from these scenes to create animation frames that could
be used to create videos. The virtual reality scenes were designed in
Visual Nature 2 using inputs from other software including ESRI
ArcMap for spatial data and Rhinoceros 2 for 3D objects such as
buildings and ships.
The result of this project will be a set of videos with a graphical
user interface that will allow visitors to browse and play the
available videos displayed on a large format screen in The Rooms. The
resulting scenes can also be used in the future to allow the rapid
production of new animations based on new requirements.
Project team
- Project management: Dr. Alvin Simms
- Principal designer: Seth Loader
- Assistant designer: Chris Boyce
