An “Animated Spatial Time Machine” in Co-Creation: Reconstructing History Using Gamification Integrated into 3D City Modelling, 4D Web and Transmedia Storytelling

Mario Matthys,Laure De Cock,John Vermaut,Philippe De Maeyer,Nico Van De Weghe

doi:10.3390/ijgi10070460

Mario Matthys, Laure De Cock + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10070460

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Abstract

More and more digital 3D city models might evolve into spatiotemporal instruments with time as the 4th dimension. For digitizing the current situation, 3D scanning and photography are suitable tools. The spatial future could be integrated using 3D drawings by public space designers and architects. The digital spatial reconstruction of lost historical environments is more complex, expensive and rarely done. Three-dimensional co-creative digital drawing with citizens’ collaboration could be a solution. In 2016, the City of Ghent (Belgium) launched the “3D city game Ghent” project with time as one of the topics, focusing on the reconstruction of disappeared environments. Ghent inhabitants modelled in open-source 3D software and added animated 3D gamification and Transmedia Storytelling, resulting in a 4D web environment and VR/AR/XR applications. This study analyses this low-cost interdisciplinary 3D co-creative process and offers a framework to enable other cities and municipalities to realise a parallel virtual universe (an animated digital twin bringing the past to life). The result of this co-creation is the start of an “Animated Spatial Time Machine” (AniSTMa), a term that was, to the best of our knowledge, never used before. This research ultimately introduces a conceptual 4D space–time diagram with a relation between the current physical situation and a growing number of 3D animated models over time.

Highlights

Ghent’s cases, a process description was performed on multidisciplinary actions at the intersection of different domains using 3D co-creation: historical and open 3D data, softand hardware, 4D web architecture, 3D gamification and Transmedia Storytelling (TS)
A roadmap for 3D co-creation was not available before the start and the process was built on voluntariness without solutions exist for basic applications without writing a new code
Could the 3D reconstruction of the lost architecture and environments be improved by promoting 3D co-creation? Based on Ghent’s cases, a process description was performed on multidisciplinary actions27atofthe intersection of different domains using 3D co-creation: historical and open 3D data, softand hardware, 4D web architecture, 3D gamification and TS

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In the 4th century BCE, Plato played with dimensions in the “Allegory of the Cave”, while in “Flatland, a romance of many dimensions”, Abbott dreamed about 4D in his novel of 1884 [1,2]. Queen sang in 1975, “Is this the real life? Dreaming in and about three and more dimensions in the continuum between reality and virtuality was not new in the 21st century. It is only since the last two decades that digital graphics’

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