Summer Research Partnership in Digital Humanities – Virtual Viking Longship Project

31 October 2024
By Will Shrestha '25

This past summer, I had the opportunity to work with a team of fellow students on the Virtual Viking Longship Project (VVLP), an interdisciplinary, collaborative project between Carleton College, Grinnell College, The Viking Museum Haithabu, and The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. One of the main objectives within the grant narrative is to create an immersive, educational virtual reality experience that will allow users to interact with historical artifacts of the Viking Age. Overseen by Austin Mason, one of the co-PI’s of the project and the director of Digital Arts & Humanities at Carleton College, our team set out to expand upon the work passed on to us by the previous group of students who had worked on the project the year before us.

I spent a lot of my time this summer learning how to use different 3D modeling softwares as I was hired as a 3D artist with no prior 3D modeling experience. I dedicated the first couple weeks of the summer to watching Blender tutorials and learning how to use all of the tools provided by Blender. I created a rough 3D model of a gangplank in Blender as my main Blender contribution to the project. Another large chunk of my summer was dedicated to creating 3D models using photogrammetry on Agisoft Metashape. I created several 3D models of historical artifacts such as a wooden spoon with carvings, a toy boat, and a small wooden knife. Some of these artifacts can already be interacted with in the current version of the virtual reality experience.

Overall, I ended up learning how to use several different softwares related to 3D modeling which I am excited to use in the future. I am also glad to have made 3D models as tangible contributions to the Virtual Viking Longship Project that will hopefully make it to the final product. This summer has given me an appreciation for not only the Viking Age but the future of teaching history using digital methods as a whole. I am looking forward to seeing how digital methods reshape education and how I can be a part of that process.