This past summer, I worked with a team headed by Austin Mason of the Digital Arts & Humanities program on the Virtual Viking Longship Project—a collaboration between Grinnell College and Carleton College with the goal of recreating Viking Age artifacts and ships in a virtual reality space that would allow viewers to interact with them in a way impossible through normal museums.
I was one of four students who stayed over the summer to work on the project. My duty was to work on the art aspects of the project, and create the 3D representations of objects, as well as manage lighting and visual presentation in the game environment. Other members of the group were responsible for programming the game experience, as well as researching the aspects of viking culture we were representing in the experiences.
While working with Will, the other 3D artist on the team, we took photogrammetric representations of the ancient artifacts, and tried to interpret what they would have looked like when first made and in regular use. From there, we utilized Blender, Substance Painter, and the Unity Game Engine to create faithful recreations.
(Above: A photo scan of the Hedeby Chest, compared to a digital recreation.)
I was also responsible for creating environments in which the experiences took place. Namely, I created an ocean environment in which the viking longship could be at sea, and a snowy beach from which the user could place a gangplank onto the ship for another interactive experience. For these, there was no source material from which to work, so my task was to consult the research specialist and create convincing, accurate spaces. I consulted maps of the areas in which vikings traveled, and found locations that could have been plausibly used as ship’s docks to reconstruct. This was especially challenging, considering the limited computational resources of the virtual reality headset we were working with- I had to create convincing backgrounds with low polygon counts and texture sizes, such that the meta quest I was working on could render them convincingly.
(Above: An example of an environment made for the gangplank experience)
This summer internship served as a stress-test of my skills in digital art, taught me more about the Viking Age than I had known before, and served as a fantastic demonstration of the collaborative opportunities available at Carleton. Moving forward from the position, I know what areas I need to continue developing, as well as where I can be confident in my abilities. Additionally, I’m more interested than ever in continuing work on the project, or finding other internships over future breaks.