It's a museum curator's dream: Spoon in the history, with a healthy dose of Myst. For Connecticut's Pequot Indian tribe, proprietors of Foxwoods (which bills itself as "the largest casino in the entire world") the opening of a $US200 million museum will come as a kind of new-media resurrection. The museum, which is slated to open next summer, will be narrated using lush, full-screen 3-D animations in dozens of interactive kiosks spread out across the museum grounds.
More than simple touchscreen technology, the photo-realistic renderings are intended to serve as a vital historical resource for the museum, the largest owned and operated by Native Americans. Because so little remains of the tribal site, the organizers turned to the 3-D team at New York development agency Nicholson NY to counteract the erasure virtually.
"What do you do about the [Pequot] fort that is just a stain in the ground?" asks project director Ian Van Tuyl. "Twenty years ago, they would have painted a picture."
Now, using detailed archaeological research and minute fragments of wampum and bone, the Nicholson team has created seven fundamental "shows," including a caribou hunt, information on woodland resources, and the modern history of the reservation.
The flagship show is the luminous re-creation of a Pequot fort that had been built in 1675. The low, broad fort, constructed by the tribe during King Philip's war between the English colonists (which the Pequots joined) and an array of other tribes, was rediscovered in 1983 by archaeologists, when it had decayed down to a band of dark silt in the ground. Though the structure is gone, the site is "one of the richest spots for archaeology in New England," says Van Tuyl. "The land was never developed by Europeans, and there was never any disturbance."
Swooping through the landscape, the virtual tour lets users wander from the garbage dump to the "gun flint" area to the cornfield. All scenery was created using a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2, the same machine used to render frames for Jurassic Park. "They had hundreds," says 3-D director Raymond Doherty. "We have one." The quality was so convincing that while at Siggraph, Doherty says, executives from Digital Domain thought the images were photos.
It's no surprise, considering how crucial authenticity and accuracy have been for the project. Rather than rely on computer generation, the team turned to the local flora and fauna for the layers - in effect, "textures made by God," as one project member says. Doherty went slogging through the reservation's Cedar Swamp to take photographs of the bark from Atlantic white cedars, red oaks, and hickory trees. The photos were then scanned and positioned on the rendered frames. "In principle, we wanted [the images] to root the project to the place," says Doherty.
