Virtual Middletown: Integrating Three-Dimensional Virtual Environments and Digital Source Materials
James Connolly, Ball State University
John Fillwalk, Ball State University
Muncie, Indiana is in all likelihood the most thoroughly studied small city in the United States. It was the subject of Robert and Helen Lynd’s seminal investigation into American industrial life, Middletown (1929), and of dozens of follow-up studies. The Lynds and their numerous successors have generated a substantial body of source material documenting attitudes and behavior in this small industrial city in eastern Indiana. The Lynds’ reporting, along with photographs, film footage, oral histories, and manuscript materials make it possible to simulate in three-dimensional form the historical built environment and aspects of past social experience. The Virtual Middletown project reproduces in precise detail factory floors, domestic settings, a downtown entertainment venue, and other historical situations and uses them as environments for avatar-driven interactive experiences akin to those available at living history museums.
The interactivity of the Virtual Middletown environment will extend beyond immersion in these three-dimensional reproductions. Users will have immediate and easy access to a digital archive of the source materials used to design the built environment and develop interpretive experiences. The aim of this arrangement is to encourage them to think critically about the process of recreating past experience and to recognize that such reproductions, even as they make claims to being realistic, are in fact interpretations.
Connolly and Fillwalk will introduce the audience to a completed prototype of the Virtual Middletown project, a simulation of the Ball Brothers Glass Company factory in Muncie, Indiana. They will discuss and illustrate the process of scholarly interpretation in 3D virtual environments, as well as issues related to instructional design and technological frameworks.