An Example Of A Historical Virtual World

The technology to create virtual 3d worlds is getting to be more in reach of students. Check out this historically accurate recreation of 17th century London created by a De Montfort University student team called Pudding Lane Productions.

H/T arstechnica.com

From the article:

Pudding Lane Productions offered a fly-through of seventeenth century London and, although unpopulated, is packed with references to human activity—laundry on lines, market stalls and so on. The overall impression is of a space somewhere between Assassin’s Creed and Fable.

Following the development of the environment on the team’s blog you can see some of the gaps between what data was deemed noteworthy or worth recording in the seventeenth century and the level of detail we now expect in maps and other infographics. For example, the team struggled to pinpoint the exact location on Pudding Lane of the bakery where the Great Fire of London is thought to have originated and so just ended up placing it halfway along.

I have created such databases myself and think this one is of high quality. Nice work! Now we just need to organize virtual field trips using VR glasses such as Oculus Rift.