This Old Digital City one year later: Experience gained, lessons learned, and future plans

At VSMM 2000, we described the creation of a not-quite-finished immersive interactive museum exhibit called "This Old Digital City" (TODC). The exhibit uses real-time interactive virtual environment technology to immerse visitors in a 3D reconstruction of turn-of-the-20th-century. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Museum patrons sit tit and operate a "time machine" to freely explore a forty-nine square block region of the city modeled in high-resolution 3D graphics. As visitors tour the city, they are able to access multimedia content associated with buildings and other historically significant sites. We see TODC as an example of using high-end virtual environment technology as an interface to historical archives. The exhibit opened October 27. 2000, soon after VSMM 2000. In this paper. we discuss our experience with the exhibit and future plans for it.