Overview
This project builds an interactive 3D model of St. George’s, Bermuda – a UNESCO World Heritage Site founded in 1612. Using historical data about properties and residents and laser scans of the modern town, we build historically accurate digital models of St. George’s in 1775 and other past years to enable students, scholars, and the public to “virtually visit” this important Atlantic seaport. The models bring history to life for humanists studying slavery, gender, trade, maritime culture, and architecture, and for the town’s 500,000 annual visitors. We train college students in all aspects of digitally modeling an entire historic town. The project seeks to aid heritage planners, develop new 3D GIS interactivity modes, contribute to the field of public history, and offer a model for other similar urban social history digital projects.
Our Vision
Imagine walking the streets of the oldest living town in British America, able to visit different moments over the past four centuries and see both how the town and its residents changed and how the larger Atlantic world changed around them. Now imagine interacting with the townscape, learning with a few mouse clicks who resided in each house and how white and black members of these households lived. Imagine being able to virtually enter these houses and see how they were furnished in 1620, 1650, 1725, 1775, 1812, or 1860 – to study how they organized their material worlds and where common household activities took place. Now imagine residents in period-appropriate costume walking the town’s streets in numbers proportional to population in age, sex, and race, going about their business and chatting with you about work, gossip, hopes, fears, and families. Imagine, in short, a meticulously researched, dynamic reconstruction of a changing, evolving seaport town. You assumed the role of historian, ethnographer, or simply curious visitor to learn first-hand how Englishmen, Africans, and Native Americans established a community and, over time, created a distinct American culture on an island, Bermuda, at the center of the Atlantic Ocean.
Right now, no interactive virtual historical world like the one just described exists. The Virtual St. George’s (VSG) project seeks to create one by building a series of historical 3D models of Bermuda’s first capital from its founding in 1612 to circa 1900, using a wealth of historical evidence and cutting-edge field data capture and modeling methods to reconstruct a living community across twelve generations. The project has already become a rich humanistic geospatial laboratory for a score of undergraduate and graduate students who have translated historic property and biographical data into digital formats, analyzed historic maps overlays in ArcGIS, constructed and furnished digital models of buildings using SketchUp Pro, and built small area prototypes of interactive spaces in Unity 5.0, a videogame design platform. Project Director Michael Jarvis has taught an upper level college course (HIS 285: Digital History) that trains students in historical research, digital data management, 3D model production, and interactive simulation design using their specific research and modeling sites.
When ultimately completed, the project’s various historicized 3D townscapes will help visitors visualize how St. George’s evolved through adaptations to environmental change, world events, fluctuating global markets, local demographic shifts, and architectural influences. Visitor engagement can vary from the focused exploration of a past individual building’s interior using probate inventories (like a virtual house museum in the style of Colonial Williamsburg) to an open-ended urban exploration of the town’s docks, warehouses, and streets, populated with animated St. Georgian avatars. Simulations will incorporate game-play missions (such as delivering letters from overseas, haggling with a ship captain, aiding an enslaved sailor to escape) to engage visitors of different ages to give direction and purpose to their spatial explorations , teach social science and critical thinking skills, and represent historical realities.