The virtual Williamsburg Project that’s funded by the National Leadership Grant seeks
to create a 3D interactive model of part of Williamsburg as it looked in 1776.
And Williamsburg is an important revolutionary city in our history in creating this interactive
model that shows what it looked at one particular point in time allows us to then link information
to the model and create an educational resource.
It’s something that will hopefully engage younger generations who are used to interacting
through digital and game technologies.
It will look like several different things though is the issue we have.
We have very elaborate models, architectural historical rich models of researched forms
of the buildings and the contents that they were in.
So they are going to occur in many different places actually.
So they’ll be ways in which people can take tours of certain kinds of topics.
The great thing about 3D modeling, 3D gaming technology is the fact that we can really
set up a multiple format.
So we can create high resolution images of the models that can then be embedded online.
It could be accessed on site.
They’ll also be the interactive format where people can go online and actually navigate
their way through the town virtually either taking tours and surfing the web through the
model or they can if they’re familiar with navigating the virtual environment, you could
just explore on their own and pick whatever spaces they want to see.
So we can actually make it available in a whole range of different ways and that’s
what so great about this kind of technology.
The one little curiosity is the idea that people come with all sorts of preconceptions
about what things might look like.
And so the issue of how they public will react to some of the-- what we believe really are
the forms that existed at that time is going to be a curiosity.
For instance, I think the one we most often talk about is things like the trees.
Everybody thinks that the tree-lined streets and the 1776 time period was there
were very few trees along the streets.
And so it’s going to look in some sense very different, very relative to that.
So how the public is going to react to that is going to be a very interesting part.