Sandby Borg: A virtual connection

This project aims to communicate difficult heritage through visualisation and virtual reality. Through a collaborative effort between the Department of Museum Archaeology at Kalmar County Museum, RISE Interactive C-studio and Linnaeus University, a VR demo will be produced with the aim to engage the user in the story of Sandby borg through interaction, storytelling, and immersive virtual experience. 

About Sandby Borg

Sandby borg is located on Öland and was in the 400-century the victim of a brutal massacre, where the deceased have been left where they then fell. Giving archeologist unique insight into the time of the gruesome event, as well as how the daily life might have looked like by the end of the 5th century AD.

Several spectacular discoveries has been made, among these are treasure troves containing exclusive brooches as well as glass beads originating from the Mediterranean area of the Roman Empire. The excevations has been conducted annually since 2011. 

Learn more about the compelling findings at Sandby Borg from Helena Victor's (Project coordinator, archaeologist, Ph.D.) presentation, held in November 2016 at Riksantikvarieämbetet. (In Swedish)

Immersive & Interactive Storytelling

Digital communication tools are well suited to increasing accessibility and participation in archaeology, and virtual reality offers the unique potential of immersive experience where the user gets to feel the history with their senses. This project is connected to the research project Frozen in Time - histories of life and moments of death at Sandby borg, and will relate to these research questions connected to the difficult heritage. This VR demo will be used as material to initiate discussions about difficult topics like violence and the mentality of war in an difficult cultural heritage like Sandby borg in relation to contemporary society and conflicts of today. The project further aims to work as a springboard for potential future developments of VR to communicate through archaeology and cultural heritage.

Our Method & Process

Our process in this project consits of three workshops that will inform the development of a VR-demo. There will be exploration in how to increase immersion with both sound and visualisation. We will also search for a suitable level of interaction and how mixed media can inform about the historical objecs found in the house, as well as the destiny of those individual who were found in what is now reffered to as "House 40".

Links

Sandby borg is an ongiong excevation project, find out more about their process and latest finds.