Envisioning Heorot VR Project
Dr. Tim Arner, Associate Professor of English
Continuing the work of The Grinnell Beowulf, the project will construct a VR simulation of Heorot based on archaeological excavations of Viking meadhalls in Denmark and England, particularly the hall at Lejre, as well as accounts from historical and poetic records from the early Middle Ages. The project will help modern readers of Beowulf to better understand the civic spaces that helped shape the poem’s social structures, allowing them to see how the layout of the hall contributes to its function as a political and social arena.
Links
Project website
Playable VR Experience (Vive and Rift)
Project tweets (#GCIELBeowulf)
The Grinnell Beowulf website
The Mathematical Museum
Dr. Christopher French, Professor and Department Chair of Mathematics and Statistics
The Mathematical Museum is envisioned to be a virtual reality learning environment, with individual rooms each dedicated to illustrating a mathematical idea for which a virtual environment would be particularly well-suited. For example, a room might be dedicated to 4-dimensional polytopes, like the hypercube or the 4-dimensional analogue of a tetrahedron (a pentatope).
Simple animation of a pentatope projected into 3D. The trouble here is that the 3D pentatope is then projected into 2D on the computer screen, hence no depth perception, and the viewer also has no control of the animation as it is non-interactive.
We can understand 3-dimensional objects through 2-dimensional pictures or graphs that can be manipulated and transformed with a computer algebra system. Thus, 4-dimensional objects might be more accessible in a virtual 3-dimensional space. Over time, rooms in the museum could be grouped into wings devoted to geometry, algebra, topology, mathematical physics, and the history of mathematical instruments.
Links
Graph-Coloring GitHub repo
Graph-Isomorphism GitHub repo
VMM-Ruled-Surfaces-Experience GitHub repo
Video of VMM-Ruled-Surfaces-Experience tutorial
Video of VMM-Ruled Surfaces-Experiences exercises
VMM-Curvature-Experience GitHub repo
Video of VMM-Curvature-Experience walkthrough
The Virtual Viking Longship Project
Dr. David Neville, Digital Liberal Arts Specialist
Dr. Tim Arner, Associate Professor of English, Associate Dean of Curriculum and Academic Programs
Dr. Austin Mason, Director of Digital Liberal Arts, Assistant Director of the Humanities Center for Digital Humanities
This NEH-funded project explores and tests strategies for integrating and fairly compensating undergraduate student learning and labor in the development of long-term digital humanities research projects. Combining the strengths of two leading liberal arts colleges with the multidisciplinary affordances of virtual reality (VR) technologies, the project aims to create an immersive VR experience for visualizing the social and cultural roles of a Viking Age longship by forming a DH community of inquiry and practice that cultivates deep competencies in spatial computing within the context of a liberal arts education. Student co-authored outcomes will include: (1) an open-source minimum viable product VR experience made in consultation with museum partners in the US and Europe; (2) experience design document outlining future development; (3) presentations on our findings at major DH and History conferences; and (4) open-access article detailing the project’s strategies and recommended best practices.
Links
Project website
Project GitHub repo
NEH Grant Supports Immersive Virtual Reality Project
Virtual Vikings
NEH Final White Paper
Hedeby Chest VR Experience
