Costas Papadopoulos is an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities and Culture Studies at Maastricht University. His work has its roots in ethnography, archaeology, digital humanities, and museum and heritage studies, exploring modelling and representation at the intersections of the physical and the digital. It advances understandings of the experience and perception of heritage; engages in the development of open educational resources for the digital humanities; explores ways to build epistemological frameworks for multimodal research; and, integrates Arts into STE(A)M learning via socially-engaged research. Most of his research has focused on digital applications in archaeology and cultural heritage with a particular emphasis on 3D visualisation. He is PI of PURE3D which develops an Infrastructure for the Publication and Preservation of 3D Scholarship.
Susan Schreibman is Professor of Digital Arts and Culture at Maastricht University. She works at the intersections of computationally-based teaching and research in the interplay of the digital archive, cultural innovation, and participatory engagement design, processes and projects. A focus of her research is in the design, critical, and interpretative analysis of systems that remediate publication modalities and manuscript culture from the analogue world, while developing new born-digital paradigms. She has published and lectured widely in digital humanities and Irish poetic modernism. Her digital projects include Letters 1916-1923, #dariahTeach, IGNITE, and PURE3D.
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This paper explores different ways of modelling and simulating complex spatial and temporal events, such as battles, for which it has been practically impossible to (re)construct the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of variables of which they are comprised. This research utilises as a case study the Battle of Mount Street Bridge of the Irish Easter 1916 Rising, in which the number of British casualties has been fiercely debated. The research is framed within the theory and practice of digital scholarly editions, which provides a new paradigm for approaching virtual worlds in a contextualized and annotated environment. This paper also discusses the challenges of creating virtual worlds for online environments in which there is rapid obsolescence of software and platforms and an absence of standards.
A case study on methods for digitally modelling complex spatial events with inspiration from digital scholarly editions.
In the last three decades, cultural heritage, history, and archaeology have made use of three-dimensional digital (re)constructions as tools in the process of knowledge production by making complex two-dimensional data more comprehensible and by simulating spatial and temporal aspects of the past that could not be addressed by using conventional methods. Despite the precariousness of working with 3D technologies in which research projects are reliant on software, hardware, operating systems, and the Internet itself that constantly change, we argue here that the benefits of translating physical environments into three-dimensional models - both the process of modelling as well as the models themselves - outweigh the problems caused by the medium.
Contested Memories: The Battle of Mount Street Bridge project focuses on a battle
that took place on Wednesday, 26th April 1916 during the week of the Easter
uprising in Dublin. This battle, between a small group of Irish rebels and a
much larger force that the British high command sent to Dublin to put down the
rebellion, was used to investigate to what extent a virtual world can enable
alternative forms of research, help in the interpretive process, and assist
knowledge production for both general audiences and specialists. More
specifically, it explores how 3D (re)constructions can augment and enrich the
palette of methodologies that we use to answer traditional historical questions
by enhancing our ability to understand and interpret space as well as to map
temporal dimensions within that space. In seeking to map both time and space, we
encountered a common problem reported in 3D scholarship; that is the depiction
of time in a meaningful way that complements the spatial dimension and enhances
the perception of the virtual world
This paper will discuss the decision-making process of gathering and
interpreting primary sources for the construction of a virtual world, issues of
3D modelling and representation, the challenges that the project faced, and its
future directions. It will also problematise the term virtual world
by
referring to previous and current examples in heritage studies, also proposing a
typology based on their use in teaching, research, and dissemination. It will
argue that the process of (re)construction is a valuable tool that provides
opportunities for experimentation and new insights, enabling specialists to
better comprehend the multidimensional and ambiguous character of historical
settings and events. Finally, by drawing from the theory and practice of Digital
Scholarly Editions, this paper will suggest that 3D (re)construction projects
can become knowledge sites in which the models are seen as text, and documentary
evidence in the form of apparatus provides an enriched understanding of its
content, thus giving credit and value to the products of 3D modelling as
scholarship.
In more than three decades of 3D heritage visualisation and simulation there have
been immense technological advancements in both hardware and software, which
have also driven the development of theoretical and methodological approaches,
processes, and products; from the first schematic representations of buildings
(see
In the last ten years, there have been several definitions for virtual worlds
primarily reflecting Second Life and multiplayer game approaches; from Bell’s
(2008) synchronous, persistent network
of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked
computers
to Schroeder’s (2008) persistent virtual environments in which people experience
others as being there with them – and where they can interact with
them
. Girvan (2013) defines a virtual world as a persistent, simulated, and immersive
environment facilitated by networked computers, providing multiple users
with avatars and communication tools with which to act and interact in world
and in real time
. Nevelsteen (2017) on the other hand describes a
virtual world as a simulated
environment where MANY agents can virtually interact with each other, act
and react to things, phenomena and the environment; agents can be ZERO or
MANY human(s), each represented by MANY‖ entities called a virtual self (an
avatar), or MANY software agents; all action/reaction/interaction must
happen in a real-time shared spatiotemporal nonpausable virtual environment;
the environment may consist of many data spaces, but the collection of data
spaces should constitute a shared data space, ONE persistent shard
.
Trying to map these definitions to historical virtual worlds becomes futile,
since the vast majority do not fulfil the necessary conditions to be classified
as virtual worlds: avatars, multiple users and in-world interaction, real-time,
persistency, communication tools, to name a few. Also, these definitions neglect
more recent approaches in which such environments become tools in research and
education. For this reason, we might either abandon the term and continue using
the more generic terminology that is typically used interchangeably in such
contexts, such as 3D visualisations, computer graphic simulations, and digital
(re)constructions, or reconceive the definition of virtual worlds so that they
can better encompass the historical environments created and their role and
value in the process of knowledge production.
An abundance of virtual world projects in archaeology, history, and
heritage-related subjects have been created, especially since the 2000s,
particularly during the years that Second Life and Open Simulator were at their
peak. Both platforms, and especially Open Simulator which is the free and
open-source alternative to Second Life, democratised the process of creating
virtual worlds as they did not require highly advanced 3D modelling skills.
These online environments enabled a novel way of experiencing history/heritage
and working in an online environment for pedagogical and research purposes
unlike anything previously available
Second Life, as the name suggests, attempts to immerse its users in a world that
has its own social and cultural systems, industry, and currency, while
Despite the profound benefits of platforms, such as Second Life, it was the advent of Unity Technologies that boosted the production of heritage virtual worlds since they enabled the creation of highly-detailed models, the embedding of features found in game engines, such as real-time physics and lighting effects, while allowing in-browser experiences without the need to download additional software. They also allowed modellers to reuse their content created in specialised computer graphics packages, thus not requiring in-world modelling or the translation/modification of existing models. However, similar to the problems in Second Life, online virtual worlds developed in the game engine, Unity 3D, recently ceased to exist due to the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) that was phased out by browsers in the period 2014-2017. The NPAPI is a technology that allows third party software developers to produce plugins and web extensions that can run software as a layer within html pages on internet browsers (e.g. Oracle’s Java plugin, Adobe Flash, and Apple Quicktime web extensions). Since these plugins became increasingly vulnerable to security flaws, browser manufacturers decided to replace the plugin functionality with HTML5 compliant approaches.
Considering that virtual worlds developed in Second Life or Unity 3D were
intended to be available online, it is striking that at the time of writing this
paper only a handful are still accessible. Contrary to the video game community
that often builds emulators to overcome – even temporarily – problems of access
In the following paragraphs, we will refer to previous and current heritage
virtual worlds projects dividing them into three broadly defined categories:
Virtual Museums; Research Laboratories; and Teaching Environments, taking into
account the features of each environment, intended purposes, as well as use by
different audiences.
Virtual Museums
are environments that represent buildings, cityscapes, or
landscapes at a moment of their existence or through time, allowing user
navigation either using avatars or a first person view. We use the word
museum
since these environments are experienced in a similar way to
museum exhibits; users can move around and observe the artefacts but cannot
interact with, manipulate, or modify them. Such virtual worlds include little or
no contextual information in-world, whereas contextual and interpretative
material may be supplied in the form of accompanying online resources, e.g.
website, or conventional publications. By definition, most virtual world
projects fall under the Virtual Museums
category since the minimum
condition that has to be fulfilled is a 3D model accessible online. For example,
the Zamani project (http://www.zamaniproject.org/) has recorded highly-detailed and
metrically accurate 3D models of Africa’s heritage sites that – among others –
can be explored using the Unity Web player. Similarly, the Virtual Rosewood
Research project (http://www.rosewood-heritage.net/) that focuses on Rosewood, Florida,
an African American town destroyed during the 1923 race riot (
Research Laboratories
on the other hand, do not only enable users,
primarily researchers, to experience (re)constructions of and gain knowledge
about past places, periods, and events but also provide them with
experimentation opportunities by permitting the alteration of variables, thus
allowing testing of hypotheses, new approaches to old data and research
questions, and the construction of new narratives. These processes stimulate
discussion and produce creative responses, thus having a transformative impact
on historical sense-making, reasoning, and understanding. Therefore, virtual
worlds become synonymous with knowledge production and the research process that
leads to their creation, i.e. problematising sources, identifying variables, and
justifying solutions, opens a dialogue that can generate new avenues of
scholarship unlike traditional spatiotemporal approaches. For example, the
Digital Hadrian’s Villa project
In the Teaching Environments
category, virtual worlds act as fora of
communication, discussion, and outreach. It is not only about the virtual worlds
themselves but also about how such worlds are used as a basis for teaching
different groups and stakeholders, enquiry, synthesis, and critical analysis.
Although there are a few cases where virtual classes are held within virtual
worlds in which users can collectively attend teaching sessions and interact
with each other and the instructor(s), as well as virtual worlds that were
adapted to be used as teaching material (see for example
While the typologies of 3D scholarship outlined above make the models of use to a
wider audience, they do not provide an integrated environment that brings to the
fore the decision making process, for example by making available the materials
collected that informed the research behind or steps taken to create the models
so others - beyond the research team - can utilise the knowledge developed
during the modelling process. As a result, this scholarship exists in a
trifurcated information space; the original models are available to the
individual or the team who worked on them, a version of the models - often
downgraded - exists electronically (if technology allows), while the materials
that informed decisions and the knowledge generated from them is written about
in conventional publication formats or never become available beyond the
research team. To overcome this, we are proposing a fourth, still relatively
nascent typology, that of 3D Scholarly Editions. 3D DSEs are knowledge sites
that provide hermeneutic richness
The typologies explored here are offered as ways of creating broad categories for 3D (re)presentations in order to begin to develop, not only a shared vocabulary for discussing virtual worlds as knowledge production, but to begin to theorise this type of scholarship, not in terms of best practice but in terms of more consistency with other digital scholarship, including research goals, audiences addressed, methodologies and standards, and features that can be expected from each type of virtual world.
In the research trajectory of the Battle of Mount Street Bridge project, the 3D
environment was one of several tools and resources that formed a Research
Laboratory (per the typology enumerated above). Analogue and digital resources,
spreadsheets and models, along with excursions to the battle site were utilised
to build an increasingly nuanced and complex understanding of the battle. Once
the article was published that explored our research findings
3D DSEs are 3D (re)constructions which include robust contextual information,
metadata, and paradata either in the form of in-world annotations or
supplementary side sources. In both cases the contextual information or
annotation can be text or multimodal. Indeed, we would argue that the annotation
needs to take advantage of the affordances of the medium to be truly effective
in providing access to the creation process, background information about the
world being modelled, and alternative versions of the (re)construction. This
type draws from the theory and practice of Digital Scholarly Editing (DSE) which
derives from a long history of practice in editing texts for print (See
The digital has provided textual scholars with a wide palette with which to
remediate, not only the textual record (from grave inscriptions to manuscripts
of modernist texts to multiple editions of a work in print), but increasingly
other mediums of knowledge transmission (e.g. images, audio recordings, maps),
recording, (re)creating, and describing a wide variety of linguistic and
non-linguistic features (verbal, visual, oral, and numeric). Textual scholarship
includes not only the transmission of texts, but the social processes of their
transmission
The construction of such an edition entails building an intertextual network
composed of the primary text (in this case the 3D model) along with its
accompanying annotation and apparatus providing a base from which the reader can
actively engage in the knowledge creation process. Embedding the iconography of
virtual worlds into what we might broadly describe as scholarly editing
practice, opens up new vistas for scholarship and communicating the results of
that scholarship within spatiotemporal environments that are immersive and
multisensorial
All edited texts are, at their core, dialogues
Digital Scholarly Editions (as opposed to editions edited for print) have opened
up new modalities for annotation to include, in addition to text, audio, video,
images, and data linked from other sources. An example of this is The Walt
Whitman Archive (Research Laboratories
, their goal
is to explicate as opposed to test. For example, the 3D (re)constructions may
offer one version of a building; however, evidence that supports alternative
versions of certain architectural features may be represented by other models
accessible in-world through a pop-up box or by replacing the current version of
a feature with other possible versions; areas of uncertainty may be rendered in
different colours and shading to indicate hypotheses, sources, and surviving
evidence; or, ambiguous features may be toggled on and off or replaced by
alternative versions, also indicating how other elements will be affected by
these changes (e.g. a larger door opening may indicate a lighter roof
structure). Although such approaches in the creation of digital
(re)constructions, especially in archaeological contexts, have been presented
since the early years of the application of computer graphics in the field (see
for example
Several virtual world projects have followed the paradigm of what we call 3D
Scholarly Editions, providing contextual information, including metadata and
paradata, in the form of in-world textual and multimedia annotations, and/or
supplementary side sources. For example, the Virtual Middletown Living Museum
Project (http://idialab.org/virtual-middletown-living-museum-in-blue-mars/)
currently under development by IDIA Lab at Ball State University, which explores
life in Muncie, Indiana in 1920-30s based on the seminal Middletown Studies by
Robert and Helen Lynd, includes for the virtual world of the Ball Glass Factory,
in-world interactive multimedia annotations to re-enact and inform visitors
about the working life in a factory of the period.
However, we believe that 3D scholarship could afford more dynamic and interactive
annotative features that go beyond conventional textual and multimedia paradigms
as outlined above.
Contested Memories: The Battle of Mount Street Bridge (BMSB) project began in 2013 as part of the Humanities Virtual World Consortium (HVWC) ( http://virtualworlds.etc.ucla.edu/), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The HVWC planning grant was funded in 2010 at what was arguably the height of academic interest in virtual worlds. Despite the excitement of the affordances of the technology, there was a growing awareness that for virtual worlds to flourish in heritage and academic settings, an alternative platform was necessary that allowed institutions greater control over their assets along with a security of tenure. As can be seen from section two, the final blow to many of the projects constructed in Second Life was the 2012 pricing structure which caused the vast majority of projects to abandon their assets and their lands.
The HVWC sought to intervene by exploring how online and interactive virtual worlds that provide tools and methods to approach space and time in three dimensions can enable collaborative networked approaches to cultural heritage, transform scholarly communication, evoke sensorial experience, and advance research practices in the humanities. These goals were in line with the definitions of virtual worlds referenced above by Bell, Schroeder, Girvan, and Nevelsteen, with the added ambition of advancing research practice in the humanities to provide a broader palette for researchers to ask and answer research questions in which the phenomenology of time and space could not be addressed using conventional (including more traditional digital) methods. In order to fulfil the aims of the Consortium, four projects were developed that covered a range of disciplines, including ancient and modern history, architecture, archaeology, and Tibetan studies, and a time frame from the Roman period to the early 20th century. The other projects of HVWC included RomeLab, led by Chris Johanson (UCLA); Lhasa, led by David Germano, Kurtis Schaeffer, and Tsering Gyalpo (University of Virginia); and, Hadrian’s Villa, led by Bernard Frischer (University of Indiana and John Fillwalk in the IDIA Lab of Ball State University). At the time, Unity 3D was selected as the platform to host the four virtual worlds. Although Unity 3D is a closed-source game development engine, it supported, contrary to other platforms evaluated in the planning stage of the grant (Second Life and OpenSimulator), highly detailed models and most features found in game engines, including real-time physics, lighting effects, and the ability to modify the Graphic User Interface. Unity would also allow tailoring the front-end to accommodate the four diverse projects and would support networked research and learning. Most of all, using a platform that seemed to emerge as the standard for virtual worlds would allow the partners to focus on scholarly content rather than dealing with technical challenges.
The Easter Rising of 1916 is considered the single most important event in the fight for Irish independence from Great Britain. It began on Easter Monday, 24th April, with Patrick Pearse, the leader of the Rising, declaring an Irish Republic on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin's city centre. Within minutes, the British were telegraphed about the insurrection and the following day began mobilising troops who were training in England for the open fields of the Western Front. In less than a week the rebels had been defeated and rounded up. By 12th May, 14 leaders had been executed. Although the Rising might be considered a failure militarily, it set the wheels in motion for Irish independence which was achieved in 1921.
The Irish (known as the Volunteers) took a number of key locations around Dublin on Monday afternoon, forming, in effect, a perimeter ring around the city centre, blocking the major routes of entry. One of the most important of these locations was to the south where the port of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) is located. The 3rd Battalion of the Irish Volunteers took over Boland’s Mill on Grand Canal Dock on one of the southern routes into the city centre under the command of Éamon De Valera. It was from this location that the command of south inner city was to take place. A small detachment – 14 men – under the command of Lieutenant Michael Malone – occupied four buildings to the west of Boland Mills: 25 Northumberland Road, St. Stephen’s Schoolhouse, St. Stephen’s Parochial Hall, and Clanwilliam House in and around Northumberland Road. In effect, this blocked the coast road route to the city centre via Mount Street Bridge. Three additional men under the direct command of de Valera, were stationed on the rooftop of Robert’s Builders yard (Figure 1).
On Monday afternoon British authorities began mobilising troops in England to reinforce the forces already in Ireland, many of them in training. On Tuesday evening, two battalions — the 2/7th and 2/8th — popularly known as the Sherwood Foresters sailed on a night boat from Liverpool to Kingstown. On Wednesday morning around 11.00 a.m. 26 April, some 1750 men marched up the coast road towards the city centre. At around 12.30 p.m. the forward company, Company C of the 2/7th met stiff resistance from 25 Northumberland Road where Malone and James Grace opened fire into the oncoming troops as they approached the junction. The first casualties included Captain Frederick Christian Dietrichsen and 2nd Lieutenant William Victor Hawken as they were easily distinguished from the other ranks as only officers carried pistols (regular troops were issued with rifles).
The battle raged well into the evening, with detachments of British troops making
their way North on Northumberland Road, being met with gunfire, first from the
four men in Parochial Hall, then shortly afterwards by fire from the eight
Volunteers in Clanwilliam House. Other detachments made left and right flanking
actions attempting to find alternative routes by which to take Mount Street
Bridge. Troops that took the right flank found themselves under fire as they
approached the canal from Robert’s Builders Yards, and those that approached
from the left were fired upon by the Volunteers in Clanwilliam House (Figure 2). Eventually, the sheer numbers of the
British troops, coupled with their superior firepower, allowed them to take the
occupied buildings: 25 Northumberland Road fell first, with Malone killed and
Grace escaping from the back of the house; the men in Parochial Hall ran out of
ammo and escaped into the back garden; the British spent significant time in
taking the School House, only to find it empty (it had been abandoned by the
Volunteers Tuesday as being a poor position); Clanwilliam House was the last of
the Volunteer posts to fall following a concerted rush by troops from the 2/8th
and 2/7th Sherwood Foresters during which the house caught fire after successive
bombing by the British: three of the eight men inside died (see
Militarily and in terms of casualties inflicted, the battle at Mount Street
Bridge was the most successful Irish engagement of the Rising and accounted for
a significant proportion of British casualties. And although the Rising has been
the subject of a vast and growing historiography, there remained a number of
significant questions surrounding this battle. Among the most contested is the
extent of the casualties suffered by the British; the rebel casualties are clear
– four of the volunteers were killed. Most commonly, historians have cited the
figure produced for British casualties provided by General Sir John Maxwell
(appointed general officer commanding in chief the forces in Ireland after the
outbreak of the Rising) in a report compiled shortly after the event in May
1916: 234 casualties. 4 officers were killed, 14 wounded, and of Other Ranks
216 were killed and wounded
(The National Archives, WO 32/9523 Maxwell
to French, 25 Apr. 1916). These figures are usually reproduced uncritically but
are problematic. For one, they contrast significantly with other British sources
produced at the time and afterwards that offer casualty figures ranging from 155
to 196 (see
Given the potential range of figures, and the almost propagandistic nature of some of the writing on the battle itself, it was felt that this event lent itself to the types of methods outlined in this paper to create a more realistic narrative around the events on Mount Street. Moreover, this battle is of additional interest as it is one of the first that widely documents fighting in a built-up area; thus this research can demonstrate alternative ways for analysing battles using 3D technologies where extensive, albeit contradictory documentary evidence exists. Since at the time, the British Army only received training for field fighting in open environments (such as the one on the Western Front), it is important as an early example of urban warfare in understanding how a small number of strategically placed combatants, even those with a minimum of military training, as the Irish had, were able to engage and hold off a far superior force over the course of the day.
There is a long history of games and simulations invoking dynamic simulations
of the physical world used in the training of the military, particularly in
terms of strategic training for high ranking officers going back to the
Roman Empire one of the most enduring
expression of a battle game where two equal opposing forces meet on
a board
small, nondescript wooden
blocks
designed to ‘occupy the exact dimension
that troop formations would on the terrain scale’
Concerns of time and space, and the trade-offs herein, still occupy the
minds of the designers of war games or simulations created for pleasure, as
a means to understand the past, or for training purposes (although these
goals are not incompatible). In particular, in the case of representing
historical events, there exists a tension between what actually occurred and
the impossibility of representing a complex, multidimensional event with
hundreds or thousands of actors, each making decisions, the vast majority of
them lost to time. Nakamura argues that games that attempt to create
simulations of past events can be considered correct
if they present a ‘reasonable image of the
created world’
There are, however, crucial differences in utilising virtual world
technologies in the construction of war games in which the simulation
typically allows outcomes that are inaccurate historically (see
Another key difference between modelling worlds for gaming as opposed to
academic purposes is what might be typified as an absence of interaction
between the user and the virtual world (e.g. the user is not able to shoot),
be among simultaneous users, and the fact that the first-person perspective
is not avatar-based. In other words, users cannot see their representation
in the world. Computer games typically implement either a first-person
avatar-based perspective through which players can see part of the avatar’s
body, often including hands or a weapon, or a third-person perspective in
which the player can see the body of the avatar (for an overview of avatar
representation in cultural heritage applications see
Because of the constraints of modelling the complexity of real-world events
as outlined above, the project sought to implement a reasonable image of the
created world
Due to the difficulties in mapping time in 3D representations, including
technological constraints and the ambiguity of the sources, many virtual
worlds are either atemporal, thus failing to depict the passing of time and
how this affects spaces or events, or condense time, for example, by showing
changes that occur over a period (from hours to years or even centuries),
into short timeframes. Despite the amount of information gathered for the
project from a wide range of contemporary and later sources, not
surprisingly, the temporal dimension of the battle was, and remains, the
most elusive. Although sources give some indication about the sequence of
events (e.g. one house was attacked after another), they are rarely clear
about the time that a particular event took place, and indeed, are
frequently contradictory. Although the release into the public domain of
archival material during the project period, including the Bureau of
Military History (http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/) and Military Pension
records (http://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/military-service-pensions-collection/search-the-collection
), provided a wealth of information from the Irish perspective, this
often contradicted (rather than confirmed) the British regimental histories
written closer in time to the event
The project experimented with a number of representations of the world, from more schematic representations (e.g. omitting features such as textures on the buildings, road features, and natural light, Figure 3) to more detailed models that more closely mirrored the built and natural environment (Figure 4). Ultimately, the latter representation was chosen, due in some measure, to a feedback session with a group of military historians fairly early in the development process (see Figure 3) in which it was clear that the absence of realism (e.g. buildings, streets, foliage) as well as more schematic representations of soldiers, did not provide enough context for a primary audience of the research to utilise it.
Feedback from the group also strengthened our resolve to have users enter the world disembodied. This decision was taken for several reasons. We had previously decided not to allow users adopt one of the personas engaged in the battle (either one of the named people, such as a Volunteer or an unnamed British soldier) because of the historiography of Irish participation in the Great War. We did not want to encourage users to ‘take sides’ by choosing an avatar, hence affiliating oneself with the British or the Irish. While online war games, even those based on real battles, allow hundreds of players making thousands of decisions, these games loosely follow the battle trajectory. On the other hand, our goal in modelling the battle was to better understand the trajectory of the battle and what conditions afforded the Volunteers such an advantage. We had no wish to allow users to ‘relive’ the battle, nor did we want to glorify it. We also did not want additional avatars in the scene for simultaneous users, even if dressed appropriately for the time, as this would have taken away from the historicity of the created world. The goal was not to allow users to play out a specific battle using Real Time Strategy (RTS) techniques or to provide an immersive experience utilising a First Person Shooter (FPS) perspective, but to use the 3D environment as a way to map the documentary sources onto a 3D plane, emphasising the dialectical and the tactical, allowing simultaneous temporal aspects of the battle to be better understood in a way that simple 2D mapping cannot.
Contrary to many digital (re)constructions of ancient spaces in which architecture is a fundamental research question that helps understand the relationship between people, artefacts, and movement, the area in which the Battle of Mount Street Bridge took place is more or less the same today as in 1916. Although there are buildings that were destroyed during the course of the battle and replaced by modern office blocks (such as Clanwilliam House and Robert’s Builders Yard) the rest of the buildings and the layout of the streets are virtually the same (the main difference being the trees on the street are 100 years older).
Unlike the challenges that many wargame designers have faced in terms of designing large battlefields that need to be compressed into a playing field, the Battle of Mount Street Bridge took place in a constrained environment with the majority of action taking place on one city block (Northumberland Road between the Grand Canal and Haddington Road), with forays down adjoining streets around the backs of buildings (Figure 2). Moreover, there exists fairly detailed cross-referenced sources about how the battle was waged spatially, which provided the BMSB team with quite accurate means for the (re)construction.
In order to develop the model a laser scan survey was conducted by Discovery Programme Centre for Archaeological Research and Innovation. Northumberland Road, where most of the events took place, was scanned in its entirety producing a highly detailed point cloud. The option of using this detailed point cloud for automatic mesh reconstruction was explored, but the models produced were found to be too noisy and computationally intensive for a real-time visualisation. Therefore, the detailed point cloud was only used as an accurate reference to simplify the modelling of the street from scratch.
Constructing the area that was not covered by the point cloud as well as the buildings and structures that are no longer present was achieved by using Google Earth imagery, the 1911 Ordnance Survey map of Dublin, photographs taken after the Rising (particularly of the burnt-out buildings), and site visits. In the case of features that do not exist, perspective and heights in the photographic records and comparison with existing features, such as lamp posts, were used to model these as accurately as possible. On the other hand, for existing structures of the wider area that were not recorded by the laser survey, the PhotoMatch feature in SketchUp was used to generate simple effective textured photogrammetry models from a range of photographs to provide the urban context of battlefield. Finally, for the buildings that had a crucial role in the battle but there is no photographic evidence, such as the Robert’s Builders Yard, schematic models rendered in grey were created from the 1911 Ordnance Survey map. The modelled scene was given texture coordinates to enable the accurate lighting and texture in the Unity Engine.
Once the 3D model was completed in 3dsMax, it was exported as an FBX and
imported into Unity 3D Version 5.0 as an Asset to enable an in-browser 3D
world for users to explore (Figure 5). The real-time interactivity that the
platform provides with the free-roaming, user-directed camera contrary to
static renderings and predefined animations allows users to explore the
space at their own pace without predetermined paths, views, and
orientations, thus enabling new discoveries that the modeller or the
researchers involved in the decision-making process may not have considered.
The camera views in Unity were based on the functionalities developed by the
HVWC: Bird’s-eye view (from above); near-field view based on movement with
WSAD keys; and third-view in which the camera is orbited using the mouse.
Users can also
The model for the project was developed to be viewed using the Unity Web
Player, an NPAPI-based plugin. However, by the end of the first phase of the
project in 2016, NPAPI, and consequently the Unity Web Player, was no longer
supported by browsers. It was only Firefox that could run BMSB until Spring
2017, which also stopped supporting NPAPI later in the year.
The version of Contested Memories: The Battle of Mount Street Bridge that we
have been writing about here can be classified under the Virtual
Museums
category since it is comprised of a digital (re)construction
of the battlefield with limited contextual information (e.g. buildings,
people, and weapons) included in the website that hosted the virtual world
(https://mountstreet1916.ie/) and in a sidebar next to the world
once launched. However, the project team decided to create bipartite
instantiations of the model.
Given the issues in hosting the project online due to the deprecation of Unity’s web player, the optimised WebGL online version has now taken on the role of a more traditional abstract, a taster, or a more condensed version (Figure 6). This means that the online model could run smoothly on most browsers and on much slower computers contrary to the previous Webplayer version. To provide an overview of the battle, there is also a narrative-driven camera in which a voice over, featuring retired Commandant Billy Campbell, one of the researchers on the project, provides an evidence-informed interpretation of how the battle unfolded, while the camera moves concurrently to the various locations. Due to the limitations of the online model, during the narrative the user cannot interact with the scene.
On the other hand, the offline version which utilised the full Unity model is
moving towards the paradigm of 3D Scholarly Editions, providing a framework
to build a knowledge site, i.e. a single spatio-temporal environment that is
immersive and multisensorial that provides the means to: 1) depict ambiguity
and make the decision-making process transparent; 2) create annotations that
would allow readers to make their own interpretations of the text; and, 3)
depict both spatial and temporal aspects of the model. As this is part of a
broader effort to develop a 3D edition framework that could be utilised by
other Unity-based 3D worlds, the first step in the process was to develop a
user-friendly interface that will include generalisable features so other
projects can easily use them without the need to develop costly and
unsustainable bespoke solutions. The prototype developed for BMSB makes use
of clickable hotspots that include annotations for different aspects of the
battle (e.g. buildings, volunteers etc.) on a side panel. This can
accommodate not only textual information but also multimedia, such as videos
recorded during our research in which military experts talk about different
aspects of the battle, as well as sound. For example, in one of our visits
to the shooting range we recorded the sounds of guns used in the battle.
Incorporating these can also work as another cue in developing spatial
awareness and understanding the chaos of echoing
In order to make the addition and updating of annotations easy to handle without the need of any technical expertise, a mechanism that allowed their creation outside the Unity Game Engine was developed. In the first experiments, an online Google spreadsheet was used, in which each line corresponds to a hotspot which has a unique ID and includes all the information that is pulled in the annotation panel. All multimedia are stored in a separate online folder and get connected to the hotspot based on their unique IDs. In such a way any changes in the annotations can be updated within the annotation panel without any Unity or other technical skills. We are currently reworking the spreadsheet into an annotation management system that makes entering and changing information more user friendly. Since the 3D edition framework is still in development and goes beyond the BMSB project, future iterations will also include ways to present alternative reconstructions with associated annotations as well as ways to show different levels of uncertainty, both of which are critical for 3D worlds based on inconsistent and ambiguous primary sources.
The offline version also provided opportunities to experiment with more computationally intensive annotations of the battle. For example, some of the Irish Volunteers described the scene when they saw the seemingly endless formation of British soldiers approaching them. In order to replicate that and due to technical constraints in rendering 1750 realistic soldier representations, we developed a more stylised view by deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven troop formations, using the Unity plugins Apex Utility AI (http://apexgametools.com/products/apex-utility-ai-2/) and Apex Steer (http://apexgametools.com/products/apex-steer/). (Figure 8)
The 3D world of the Battle of Mount Street Bridge enabled our research team to map our interpretation of documentary evidence and secondary sources on a three-dimensional terrain. Our goal was to stimulate a wider discussion and to enlarge the palette of creative responses to the event which had been long stuck in an Irish vs British, victor vs loser mode, along with hyperbolic and largely unproven claims. Our goal, as with many other research projects in employing these methods, was that introducing 3D modelling would have a transformative impact on sense-making, reasoning, and understanding through the process of problematising sources, identifying variables, and justifying solutions, opening a dialogue to generate new avenues of scholarship unlike the traditional spatiotemporal approaches that had been used in the past.
The technical challenges encountered by the BMSB project, and also the myriad of
projects no longer accessible outlined above, highlight the precariousness of
working with these technologies
Despite these challenges, in the case of the BMSB project, there was no doubt
amongst the project team, that it was only after we had the opportunity to
navigate the photorealistic virtual world accompanied by a live narration by our
collaborator Retired Commandant Billy Campbell describing the movements of the
British soldiers that we managed to create a mental map of how and when the
battle unfolded, which in turn affected our perception of the actual
battlefield. The 3D world provided us a palette from which to map the battle in
four dimensions, with actors moving concurrently in space over time. Early
attempts to achieve this (before the 3D models were available) using more
conventional methods (eg. spreadsheets and 2D maps) lacked an aspect of this
multi-dimensionality, allowing us to only partially reconstruct spatial/temporal
aspects of the battle. Moreover, despite having repeatedly walked the
battlefield and extensively discussed the sequence and details of the various
events, it was our experience of the 3D world with its vantage and viewpoints
(whether flying above the world, looking out from a window in which a Volunteer
stood, or being on the spot where the fighting broke out, without the
distraction of present-day traffic and pedestrians) that provided us with a
sense of presence
The model was crucial in answering the primary research question with which the
project began: e.g. how many British casualties did the British forces suffer at
this battle. The model in and of itself did not provide the answer: this was
arrived at through exhaustive research into primary and contemporary secondary
sources (for more details on this aspect of research see target rich environment
with
hundreds of troops within range.
The model, above all, provided us with a way to map, both temporally and
spatially, the unfolding of the battle as the buildings held by the Volunteers
were captured or vacated, as well as the complex movements of hundreds of
British troops at any given time as various companies made flanking movements,
attempting to find alternative routes to approach Mount Street Bridge, not
knowing whether or where the Volunteers had occupied other buildings. The
photorealistic rendering of the world provided us with clearer evidence than a
two-dimensional map did of the terrain of the battlefield: eg., the lack of
cover, the obstacles in the way of storming buildings (such as the high rails
typically fronting each house). The high casualty figures may also be due to the
British troops' lack of experience. They were still in early days of training
for the open fields of the Western Front which included no training for warfare
in an urban or built-up environment. This dimensionality provided us with a
tangible fourth dimension which helped us resolve conflicting information about
how the battle unfolded in time. An example of this is the fall of 25
Northumberland Road, the first building captured by the British. The 2/7th
battalion history claims the unit had taken the building soon after 2.45pm
At the same time, the BMSB project has been used as a test case to explore how
to integrate a 3D visualisation as the primary text of a digital scholarly
edition, raising issues of how the phenomenology of place and space can be used
to design a new language of scholarly editions, one that has the ability to
model experience lost because of technological and evidentiary constraints
Despite the constantly evolving landscape in which we do research, 3D
(re)constructions provide both modellers and users with an advanced
understanding of spatial and temporal dimensions of past environments. Although
research is yet inconclusive regarding virtual world features that generate a
sense of presence in these environments, e.g. textual annotation, storytelling,
sound, visual realism etc.
The authors acknowledge the many people who have contributed to the BSMB project. Particular thanks go to John Buckley for modelling the virtual world in Unity 3D and WebGL and to Almants Auksconis for his work on AI agents. Also, to Noho, and particularly Klemens Kopetzky and Niall Ó hOisín for their work on the 3D Scholarly Edition framework. Thanks go to Hugh Denard for his early work in conceptualising and framing the BMSB project. Thanks also go to Neale Rooney, Vinayak Das Gupta, and Roman Bleier for their help in developing the initial interface for the project, to Joshua Savage for his work on the early feedback session, and to Retired Commandant Billy Campbell, Brian Hughes, and Commandant Alan Kearney for their expertise in the historical and military aspects of the project. A special thanks goes to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation who funded the initial development of the BMSB project as part of the Humanities Virtual Worlds Consortium, the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXIT) for supporting its redevelopment, and The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding our work on 3D Editions as part of the Scholarship in 3D project.
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