Gaming Engine Preserves Black Cemetery

How To: Preserve a Black Cemetery with a Gaming Engine

In Fall 2022, SOAL will be partnering with Messiah University and Harrisburg University to use photogrammetry to create a 3D storymap of Harrisburg’s Oldest Extant Historically Black Cemetery: Lincoln Cemetery! By combining the use of drones to take many pictures of each gravestone in Lincoln Cemetery, historic aerial photographs, GIS data, the historic hand-drawn cemetery maps, SOAL Restoration Weekend photos, transcribed gravestone text, and maybe even our Lincoln Cemetery genealogical research, we will be well on our way to setting the groundwork for using a Gaming Engine to Preserve a Black Cemetery!

A Lost Past is Reincarnated in the Virtual Environment with the Unity Gaming Engine

You are asking how could anyone use a Gaming Engine to preserve a historically Black Cemetery? In the article, “3D Visualization for Archaeology and Open Educational Resources,” authors By Chris Givan and Noah Boone explain how they’ve been using using photogrammetry to create 3D models of the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum’s archaeological sites and artifacts. The images collected through photogrammetry is then pulled into the Unity Gaming Engine. Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies…and it can be used to create three-dimensional (3D) and two-dimensional (2D) games, as well as interactive simulations. Unity enables virtual visitors to their website to immerse themselves in the environment, remotely, from the first person perspective!