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We’re proud to offer a first glimpse at the upcoming tool for the Soweto Historical GIS Project — a 3D mapping and historical recreation platform built on the versatile Unity 3D engine:

The Social Justice History Platform is a software platform designed to represent geographic and spatial data within an enhanced interface designed to contextualize locations and objects alongside the primary source documents that provide their historical narrative, and a range of related multimedia objects (including video, audio, images, and text).

This platform is built on the Unity engine, and is currently in closed testing.  See our first video of the SHGIS platform in action below.

Developing a User Interface (UI) layer for the Soweto Historic GIS project opens up a wide range of opportunities to integrate contextual information into the 3D virtual environment we have started to build around the township of Soweto in Johannesburg.

In this most recent version, we began to make use of Unity’s new interface system (uGUI) to add features including:

• Displaying names of regions or buildings when the user enters their boundaries
• Associating 2D map data (at both the city and building scales, contextually) with the user’s current location
• Showing contextual information in a scrollable text panel on the side of the screen
• Adding a playable/pauseable video panel to zones that have related video information

We are also excited to continue developing advanced versions of these features, including:

• An interactive photo gallery viewer, associated image slideshows with the user’s current zone
• A scrolling, time-synced transcript, building off of previous DHi software currently employed in the Creative Japanese Film Archive

These features will help make our large store of archival data more directly available to the user, without having to leave the 3D space in order to browse our repository.  We hope this allows for both deeper delving into the locations users are particularly interested in, and also the chance to discover new areas, and their unique histories, as they explore the space in 3D.

We expect this new interface layer, and the features listed above, to be integrated into our live SHGIS demo by late February, 2016.

Gregory Lord provided the following summary about our work with undergraduate research partners/collaborators:

Working with DHi’s Lead Designer and Software Engineer, Gregory Lord, DHi intern Kevin Xiao ’15 participated in the Soweto Historical GIS Project as a student modeler and virtual environment artist. Over the course of his internship, Lord taught Xiao basic 3D modeling skills within Blender (www.blender.org), an open source 3D modeling software, which Xiao was then able to apply and further develop during an extended DHi research project. Working with materials provided by Nieves, Xiao was able to use blueprints and architectural drawings to model accurate recreations of the traditional homes of the Soweto township in Johannesburg, South Africa, including the iconic Mandela Family Museum. These models were then able to be imported into the Unity engine (www.unity3d.com), to be assembled into a virtual recreation of a portion of Soweto, based on maps constructed from Open Street Maps data. The end result is a virtual recreation of several city blocks of Soweto, incorporating realistic homes and local buildings. Xiao worked on this project over the course of two years, under the instruction of Lord and the project direction of Nieves. Xiao was particularly interested in learning 3D modeling and game development tools for his independent research, and this project served as a practical example of the workflows of each type of software.

The project team is currently working to develop a qualitative 3D GIS platform for the geospatial visualization of testimony of the Soweto Uprising for wide public use.