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Solving Dublin’s Water Shortage, 12th century style

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ARCHEOVIRTUAL 2009

New General Edition Update

Three days in Sevilla

ARQUEOLOGICA 2.0

Welcome!

We are still beavering away at this project with the end in sight for the new general edition. We have some new material and exciting interactive features to show off. New features include a shiny new improved interface, with an updated timeline. On this we have implemented a magnification function to inspect the city, a population gauge, a rulers of Dublin feature and a modern street finder so you can compare modern Dublin with medieval Dublin. The Dubhlinn Daily newspaper is much improved and has its own section now, where users can explore the newspaper interactively.

We have also created a game exploring Dublin at the end of the 15th century. We have created the game using Microsoft’s deep-zoom ( thanks to Martha in Microsoft for helping us out ) where we explore a 200 mega-pixel image of Dublin. This presented many challenges for the team. Most challenging was figuring a way of rendering a massive image and switching to video on any part of the image with a seamless camera move. Campion the Younger (otherwise known as Kevin) is doing some Early Netherlandish photoshop work on the monster image. He has been watching a lot of slow moving progress bars over the past while. The style he has given the image looks like an early Netherlandish painter being inspired by satellite imagery and Where’s Wally. On the development side John Lynch jumped in with both feet into the Silverlight development tools and he will write a piece on his adventures in Silverlight when we have finished http://www.john-lynch.org/blog/. The overall result we hope will be a unique and wonderful looking game.
 
On the historical side we have been guided as always by Linzi Simpson and the steering committee. We also recently had a sit down with Mary McMahon, the main expert on at St. Audeon’s church. She has set us in the right direction for the many phases of this church. St Audeon’s church is one of the four new videos we are working on (St Patrick’s Cathedral, The Poddle and the Pool, and Wood Quay are the other three) We have also made contact with Paul McGough, an expert on medieval music. He is director of CRUX http://www.cruxvocalensemble.com/about.html , a vocal ensemble based in St Patrick’s Cathedral. He has generously given us permission to use some of their music for the project, and is helping out with any musical queries we have. We would love to explore the music of the period in more depth in the future.

The medieval Dublin team will be heading off to Italy on Wednesday to attend Archaeovirtual 2009 in Paestum, Italy, the Medieval Dublin project is being exhibited alongside 9 other Virtual Archaeology projects http://www.vhlab.itabc.cnr.it/archeovirtual/index.html. We will let you know how we get on there.

Slán go fóill…....