Toronto’s Fort York National Site to get a virtual-reality retelling
TORONTO: At one part of the Fort York National Historic Site in Toronto, visitors look out to a landscape of urban blight – rail tracks, industrial buildings with graffiti.
This spring, visitors to the landmark site will have the option of seeing something very different: That very location as it existed in the 1750s, a sylvan vista, deer frolicking in the woods, while across a stream, a native couple are on a canoe – the man spear-fishing, the woman crooning a song to the fish to rise from the water.
This is the Time Tablet experience, a unique project that will be launched soon. It uses virtual reality or VR technology to create an immersive environment and help the user be part of history itself. It has been created by Toronto-based AWE Company, headed by Indo-canadian Srinivas Krishna, a tech entrepreneur who was a filmmaker with movies that premiered at prominent festivals like Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival.
As Krishna, originally from Chennai, said, “It does give you an experience of another time, another place, that is very powerful. This is a storytelling platform for sites. The value it brings to these sites is tremendous because it’s hard to get people in there. This really provides a very compelling attraction.”
The hardware involves a customised VR viewer shell based on the open source Google Cardboard, with a smartphone encased inside running an app that generates the experience. “This story spans three centuries across nine acres, complete three-dimensional 360 degree recreations of different moments in time. This is a first of its kind experience,” Krishna said.
There are eight visual modules or VR scenes or exhibits. As visitors don the headset, they can control commands using motions of the head. Markers appear on the screen, and walking towards one unlocks a historic vista of Fort York itself, predecessor of the modern city of Toronto, and being part of the action as soldiers fire muskets to mark the establishment of the garrison in the last decade of the 18th century
visitors to a battle two decades later as an American ship appears in the harbour and the Fort’s defenders fire their cannons as a magazine explodes near them. Visitors can also watch a train chugging by on way line of the 1850s, then the longest such line in the world.
Or walk through the bar racks and get an idea of how soldiers and officers lived two centuries ago. In essence it allows visitors to inhabit another period of time.
Among the striking facets this experience highlights is how the geography of the site has changed. That creek across which the Mississauga First Nations couple canoe no longer exists.
And as Krishna pointed out “The Fort was built as a defence of the harbour and today there’s no harbour there, the whole land’s been reclaimed.”
The narrative structure of the experience evolved from discussions between Krishna the management of the site and historians. “There was a large amount of discussion and debate over what the story would be. As an artist, it then became a chal lenge of how to represent that which would be interesting, visu ally, aesthetically,” Krishna said
A design team in Toronto created the look-and-feel, while the animation pipeline flowed from Moppet Studios, based in Panjim, Goa. The technology was developed in collaboration with scientists from Ryerson University in Toronto and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
Previews run during autumn received raves from the approxi mately 250 users who were given a sneak peek of the coming attraction.
“It’s location-aware virtual reality. The software platform enables site-specific immer sive, experiential storytelling,” Krishna said.
This is a very mobile expe rience, a walk through history And given the number of people strolling through the area on a day, it was necessary to carefully lay out the nodes where they could stop and have an encoun ter with a virtual reality exhibit
For now, Krishna is looking at expanding the experience to historic locations in the US and Europe. He certainly also has India in mind. He would “love to do” a place like Hampi, and populate it again with a culture