Animators recreate Brisbane's historic streets with virtual reality program

Updated February 21, 2014 14:30:01

A small group of 3D animators is digitally recreating historic streets of Brisbane and building them into a virtual reality program.

They are trawling through historic records and photographs to get an accurate description of what the city used to look like.

Nat Harrold says he first came up with the idea while looking out his office window at a heritage building on Edward Street.

"It's a crazy idea that's what it is," he said.

"It's about setting up a four-dimensional, interactive, experiential historical database."

He says the group are also working on a smart-phone and tablet app so people in the street can detour down memory lane using 'augmented reality'.

"You can stand there and you're the master of time," he said.

"This is basically a time machine.

"It's just somewhere we can wind back time and actually put these things into context and experience them."

Augmented reality has already been used in Europe to recreate ancient buildings but no-one has tried to rebuild a whole city to scale.

Mr Harrold says he works on the project in his spare time with about four others colleagues.

"I knew there was a fair bit of history to Brisbane," he said.

"I really started to poke around and then I just explored the idea and tossed it around to the lads here."

So far the team has built a chronological history of Brisbane's Edward Street and recreated past vistas in other pockets of town.

Louise Denoon, from State Library of Queensland, says it is only possible thanks to the rare photographs stored away by librarians and curators in the past century.

"You think of the librarians 100 years ago, 50 years ago, collecting these photographs that are now being transformed into something that they wouldn't of been able to be conceive," she said.

"We're in a continuum in that what we're collecting today - the decisions, right and wrong, are the things that people will look back at in the future."

She says the archived pictures show an almost unrecognisable cityscape.

"How extraordinary that you'll be able to see what Edward Street and felt like and looked like in real time and not just a one dimensional static image," she said.

"To walk a day in the shoes of someone in the past, is such a good idea."

Earlier this year, the Brisbane City Council controversially approved the demolition of three 100-year-old brick buildings at 93 Margaret Street, known as the 'Bonded Stores', to make way for a new apartment tower.

Now Mr Harrold and his team of animators are racing the bulldozers to photograph the buildings and recreate a virtual slice of history that set for demolition.

It could be months or even years before the full historic jig-saw puzzle comes to life.

There will be more on this story on 730 Queensland tonight.

Topics: historians, history, architecture, computers-and-technology, brisbane-4000

First posted February 21, 2014 14:25:14