Page 189 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

and urban development of the city. This inno- vative proposal was developed by games design students of the Hull School of Art & Design (Hull, England), who combined the video game production process with virtual reconstructions of historic parts of the city.The project was called 1930s Albion Street after one of the landmark streets in the Georgian quarter of the city of Hull, which was badly dam- aged by bombing during the Second World War and lost much of its identity and unique charac- ter. The architectural splendour and social and educational concerns of the original city planners and architects had largely disappeared owingto the construction of new, modern buildings. Therefore, based on existing visual records of the district before the 1940s, a virtual tour of Albion Street293 was designed featuring full details of the city design and recreating the Georgian residen- tial architecture and lost landmark buildings such as the Albion Congregational Church (1842–1949) and the Royal Institution (1854–1945). The nal version was shown in the Central Library and toured several exhibitions that recalled the city’s historical past.Medieval Trinity Square294 was a more ambitious project developed by the team at the Hull School of Art & Design. It showed the area around Trinity Church Hull with the appearance it would have had during the fourteenth century. For this project thorough research was carried out in local archives, historic buildings and oral sources to gather full historical information about the place and the activities that took place in the square during the medieval period. In this case a sophisticated interactive games engine (UDK) was used to develop a moving atmospheric visualisation and virtual tours of the fourteenth-century square. Lastly, an interactive module displaying the results295 of the project was installed near the church as an interpretive resource for visitors.Virtual environments with HMDIn the eld of cultural heritage, research is increasingly being carried out on recreating virtual environments with elements of the past, as they make it possible for a particular historic site to live on without having to be physically reconstructed.Such is the case of the no longer extant palace of Darul Aman, located in the city of Tanjung Pura (West Kalimantan, Indonesia), which was virtually reconstructed from early images dating from before it was destroyed in 1946. The Department of Communication and Information Sciences of the University of North Sumatra in the city of Medan (North Sumatra, Indonesia) was commissioned to create the 3D model of the palace of Darul Aman and integrate it into a vir- tual reality environment that could be accessed using a viewing device such as a HMD or virtual reality headset (Syahputra et al., 2016).296Here a virtual environment was designed using 3D digital models of the palace, which were re- constructed from visual documentation housed in archives and museum collections. This docu- mentation made it possible to extract structural parameters by superimposing the photographs onto the digital model, and the textures that would shape the virtual recreation imitating the original construction. As most of the photo- graphs of the palace were of its exterior, other palaces of the same type were taken as models for recreating the palace’s interior.The Unity3D297 games engine platform was used to create the virtual environment. This made it possible to reconstruct the various outdoor and indoor settings, which were constantly com- pared with the visual documents to ensure the greatest possible accuracy.The result was a virtual tour whereby users with head-mounted display devices could explore the surrounding area and interior of the formerAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2017189The use of digital technologies in the conservation, analysis and dissemination of cultural heritage