The topic of virtual worlds for archaeology and history seems to have hit a bit of a lull in recent months; on the other hand, that could simply be because I haven’t been looking. This morning, in preparing for my talk to the WAGenesis developer community, I came across Blue Mars, an online virtual world whose tools would appear to be more useful than those in Second Life, in that you can import your meshes, grids, etc from common 3d modeling programs. For archaeologists with a lot of 3d CAD reconstructions, this could be quite a boon. You can even import topographic maps into Blue Mars, and so recreate not just the buildings, but the landscapes. Virtual Landscape Archaeology, anyone?

In the film below, the builder has imported the topographic map of Mars…

It’s the part of Mars that has the four large volcanoes,” he tells me, “roughly what’s in this photo.” Daniel imported NASA satellite imagery of the Tharsis Montes area of Mars where Olympus Mons resides, which is about 2400 x 2400 kilometers, and scaled that down to fit into the Blue Mars terrain map, which is 8 x 8 km. As he explains, “You can import terrain maps (both height and color texture) into a Blue Mars city. They need to be greyscale and color bitmap (.bmp) files respectively, and the correct size… But you can import any real world map as a base

Meanwhile, at Ball State, they’re recreating parts of the Panama 1915 World’s Fair in Blue Mars, for explicitly historical immersive education. Stay tuned!