ACCelerate 16 Squares Project

Creative Director and Principal Investigator
ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., October 13-15, 2017
Funded by the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT), Virginia Tech

The 16 Squares Project works to develop an online resource and on-site augmented reality and virtual reality experience of the original 16 Squares of Blacksburg, Virginia. Since Blacksburg was chartered by the Virginia Legislature in 1798, it has had over two centuries of development. The original Town of Blacksburg was laid out in a grid, on land that was donated by William Black, for whom the town is named. Five streets running northeast to southwest cross five other streets running northwest to southeast, creating the 16 Squares that we refer to today. Each square or block was then divided into four equal lots, creating a total of 64 building lots in the original town layout. Employing such technologies as virtual and augmented reality provides a unique opportunity to capture the dynamics of change and place across time. Our multilayered and sophisticated program not only does provides a factual history of Blacksburg, but also an educational treasure about the successes and challenges of civic life, capturing the extensive emotions that people experienced as they lived at various times.

As creative director, I led and worked with a team of students who took modern photos of the Blacksburg 16 Squares buildings and modeled and texturized all 96 buildings in 3D. I helped the team acquire terrain data from a quadcopter, capturing images and creating 3D data from photogrammetry.

Collaborators: Thomas M. Sherman, emeritus teaching and learning faculty member; Todd Ogle, senior associate director of applied research and planning and ICAT Fellow; David Hicks, history and social science faculty member; and David Klein, history faculty member; Vidy Aftermath, Animation; Edward Coe, 3D Printing; Daniel Monzel, 3D Modeling and 3D Printing; Erica Kowalski, 3D Modeling; Maureen Suess, 3D Modeling; Gwen Sewell, 3D Modeling; Tyler Bengtson, 3D Modeling; Fang Liu, 3D Modeling, Video and Animation; Xindi Liu, 3D Modeling; Lucas Freeman, 3D Modeling; Hadeel Ramadan, 3D Modeling; Nicholas Wyers, 3D Modeling and 3D Printing; David Byrd, 3D Modeling; Alessandro Forlini, 3D Modeling and 3D Printing; Luke Bergeron, 3D Printing; Hilary Harrison, 16 Squares Historian; Huy Ngo, Technical Assistant and presenter; Phat Nguyen, Technical Assistant and presenter; Sam Blanchard, CNC support.