Virtual History
Ian Fitzgerald takes a look at virtual reality history sites.
Elvis is alive - well virtually. He was spotted on screen at the second annual Virtual Heritage conference in London last December, Along with Plato, Marilyn Monroe and troops from the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, the first Chinese Emperor, 'The King' was there to demonstrate the abilities of Virtual Reality programs to bring to life people and places from almost any era While VR is used mainly in technical fields – medical research, architecture, design – its applications for history and heritage groups look promising.
Professor Nadia Thalmann runs Miralab, a VR research centre at Geneva University. Her working days are spent on cutting-edge projects like parallel computing and medical 'informatics', but at night she and her students turn to a personal project that has become a labour of love – the digital reconstruction of the Terracotta Army. Working from sketches, photographs and plans, they are attempting to reproduce a group of the 2,000 year-old figures in exact three-dimensional replica.
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