Virtual Reality & Game Design

Visualizing Digital Realities

We digitally publish a wide selection of scholarship in collaboration with faculty members and graduate students. We also offer consultations on digital publishing solutions.

Our broad definition of digital publishing includes projects such as:

  • Launching an online regional research network
  • Sharing open-access sustainable models for scholarly journals
  • Building an innovative open access digital version of a scholarly monograph
  • Creating an open source tour app for laptops and mobile devices
  • Applying an open source annotation tool to scholarly editions
  • Designing exhibition maps with GIS
  • Deploying research data as a database with an interactive API
  • Visualizing networks of a literary formation
  • Preparing an online art exhibition catalog
  • Developing an interactive 3D visualization of historical cities

We support and consult on innovative digital approaches to traditional publishing genres such as books, journals, and scholarly editions, and work with scholars on new forms of digital publishing such as thematic research collections, expansive digital projects, and more.

Our training center, developed in partnership with the Laney Graduate School, provides students with project and process management experience as well as digital publishing skills that enhance their professional portfolios.

We also support Emory’s Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative, developed in partnership with Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. We deploy best practices to ensure the accessibility of our digital publishing projects and offer consultations on accessibility considerations for those interested in digital publishing. 

Publishing Projects

Envisioning Baroque Rome

PI Professor Sarah McPhee leads the project, which is creating an internet-based, 3D walkable reconstruction of the city of Rome ca. 1676, using the gaming platform Unity. The reconstruction is grounded in Giovanni Battista Falda’s (1643-1678) great bird’s-eye view map of that year, and over three hundred views of the city etched by the artist. Visitors virtually enter the map, strolling the streets of the Baroque city, viewing piazzas, streets, fountains, and architecture lost in the intervening centuries.

Kottabos

This is a VR trip into the ancient world – playing Kottabos, the all-time favorite Greek party game. Prove your skill by throwing the dregs of wine from your cup at the metal disk on the pole in front of you, or fling your drops at the little cups floating in a bowl.

Sailing with the Gods

This game is designed to maximize immersion in the realities of sailing the ancient sea, closing the gap between our modern perspectives of sea travel and ancient realities, as well as integrate ancient voices from history and mythology with geospatial realities of economic resources, political trends and potential for gathering up to date knowledge.

Ur

The Royal Game of Ur, also called Twenty Squares, has a history stretching over five millennia with examples found across the Mediterranean! This is a 3D gameplay experience taking you into the ancient world!