Historic Bunker Hill 3D
Students spent fall 2021 investigating the archival record of Bunker Hill in order to document the scale and character of displacement. In spring 2022, Ahmanson Lab staff, along with students and faculty in the Collaboratory researched, designed, and fabricated a 3D, fully immersive, reconstruction of Bunker Hill from the late 1930s and early 1940s. (“The Historic Bunker Hill 3D Experience”).*
The Historic Bunker Hill 3D Experience covers twelve contiguous blocks of the neighborhood (3D models of 172 buildings, terrain, and street features) and includes an annotated layer of information about individual residences (researched and written by students), allowing visitors to immersive themselves in the lost neighborhood while accessing stories about people and places. The interactive experience was made available as a prototype on the Web, as a stand-alone app for PC and MAC, and as a VR experience via the Oculus Quest 2 headset.
Bunker Hill Refrain Collaboratory thus required students to conduct research on Bunker Hill while taking part in an interdisciplinary team designing an experimental scholarly XR humanities project.
*To document displacement, students examined household survey cards from USC Libraires Special Collections (compiled by the Works Progress Administration in 1939). To design our 3D reconstruction, the team used historical photographs from the period accessed primarily from the USC Libraries Special Collections, Huntington Library, Los Angeles Public Library, and the Getty; architectural drawings produced in 1939 by WPA artists and held at the Los Angeles City Archives; Sanborn maps from the Library of Congress; and aerial photography from 1941, housed at UC Santa Barbara’s Aerial Photography Collection.
Video Walkthrough of the Historic Bunker Hill 3D Experience
The Historic Bunker Hill 3D Experience is available for download for both Mac and PC on the Ahmanson Lab's website.
360 Degree Panorama (3rd St. & Cinnabar Alley)
To navigate the panorama, grab the scene and pull it left, right, up or down. To view as a walkable panorama on a phone, tablet click here.
360 Degree Panorama (3rd St. & Grand Ave. - Aerial View)
To navigate the panorama, grab the scene and pull it left, right, up or down. To view as a walkable panorama on a phone, tablet click here.
