Virtual Rosewood:
Virtual World Environment (VWE) of Rosewood, circa 1922
Visitors can now experience a completly reconstructed, virtual version of Rosewood as it existed prior to the 1923 race riot. This VWE was constructed using a suite of programs. Autodesk 3DS Max Design was used to model to the structures, Adobe Photoshop was used to create textures for each structure, and the entire VWE was assembled and published using the Unity 3D game engine. The layout of the community is based upon the spatial template created by mapping historic property (HP) ownership with ESRI's ArcGIS geographic information system (GIS) software. The present version of Virtual Rosewood was completed by one person (me) between June 2010 and June 2011. In all, the virtual reconstruction took about 600 hours to complete. This does not include the several months in late 2009 and early 2010 spent researching and creating the HP-GIS.
Download a map of Virtual Rosewood
In the coming months I will develop platform specific versions of Virtual Rosewood. This will allow users to explore the landscape outside of a web browser using their PC or Mac computer as well as their Apple or Android mobile phones.