Bunce Island - Through the Mirror

THE PROJECT

Bunce Island is a small (502.9 meter by 106.7 meter) island located upriver from Freetown in the country of Sierra Leone. Despite its size, its location roughly where the broad Sierra Leone River grows shallow made it an ideal spot for slave vessels to anchor safely, sheltered from the Atlantic by the larger Tasso Island while maintaining access to the complex river system of the interior and the slave trade there. This site saw 148000 enslaved Africans embarked, primarily at Bunce Island's slave fortress.

We are delighted to introduce our new project, which is focused to digitally rebuilding Bunce Island and the present-day ruins. Through a narrative structure, the users will be guided through an immersive digital experience to learn more about the complex history which took place here. Using Unreal's Metahumans and Unreal Engine 4.26, our team is developing a photorealistic environment harnessing photogrammetry and GIS technologies to bring innovative new teaching and research to the public.

This project relies on our friends and collaborators around the world, who are generously contributing photos for references, archival sources, archaeological survey materials and satellite imagery, for this work. Many of these images were collected during our field trip to Sierra Leone in 2018 and 2019, organized for researchers of the Language of Marks project.

We anticipate that this work will be the first pilot of a far-reaching network of historical events recreated using sophisticated digital technologies, offering an entirely new way to engage with difficult pasts, permitting both Afro-descendants and learners to discover and experience histories that have shaped our present world.

We intend to bring a photogrammetry team to Sierra Leone to capture the fort's topography more accurately. With local community voice actors, this project will create narratives that will facilitate a journey back into the 18th century, when the slave fort on the Bunce Island was flourishing (including a golf course for European visitors, astonishingly!).

As a spirit in the past, our audiences would complete a series of objectives around learning, which presents historical information in an organic, immersive fashion. The project will also allow our audiences to navigate between past and present, and be able to select specific MetaHuman characters, who are drawn upon the major project Freedom Narratives, which is reconstructing lives and trajectories, or the related project The Language of Marks, that uses machine learning methods to predict African regional origins and birthplaces using body markings.

This work will allow navigation and access to existing databases and research avenues while fundamentally bringing these new discoveries to life in an immersive and powerful form.

Dr. Katrina Keefer

Director | Walk With Web Inc.
Technology is driven by innovation, and education is driven by the hunger to share research and passion. It is natural that the two should combine, and right now, that means that innovative technologies being developed for the Unreal Game Engine are being creatively applied to research and teaching. We are excited as we develop an interactive historical experience which will facilitate students, researchers and the community at large as they learn more about the complex period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Beginning with our digital reconstruction of Bunce Island and the user journey through time and place to listen to the reconstructed narratives of those who were once reduced to brands and slave shackles, we are beginning a new chapter in how we teach challenging histories, and how we share our work.

Project Lead | 3D Artist

Bunce Island: Through the Mirror
OUR PROJECT CREW

David Gonzalez
3D Modeling & Scripting
Christopher Kurak
Video & Sound Editing
Maria Yala
Voice Acting
Fernanda Sierra Suárez
Graphic Design

Consultants

  • Rosaling Shaw
  • Paul Lovejoy
  • Chris Decorse

Alpha Testers

  • Paul Bridgeman
  • Mackenize Cansler-Kipp
  • Caius Kurak

Kartikay Chadha

President & CEO | Walk With Web Inc.
Epic Games and Unreal have presented a remarkable opportunity with the release of the exciting new MetaHumans - high fidelity fully rigged character meshes for use within the Unreal Engine. These extraordinary customizable characters allow us to realize our goal of producing an immersive, populated and above all living 18th century fort within which users can walk, listen, and learn about life, events, and the people of that period. This is vital as a tool, because it brings a visceral connection to historical individuals who have largely been silenced through enslavement and forced transportation. After over two hundred years, we may be able to give their descendants a way to connect with distant ancestors.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  • Yusif Kamara
  • Allan Caulker
  • Aiah Yendeh
  • Bridget Huvane
  • Michael McGill
  • Jackson DesGagne
  • Gabriela Mattia
  • Elizabeth Whitaker
  • Jared Asser
  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
  • Sierra Leone Public Archives
  • Trent University
  • OCAD University
  • York University

Our research addresses historical wrongs and the problems of lost identities created by the global slave trade, and asks how a visual approach to data collection may give rise to new discoveries and findings.

Language of Marks