MARITIME HISTORY AND VIRTUAL REALITY ; THE EXPERIMENT OF AN IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL SAILING ON THE 18TH CENTURY MERCHANT SHIP OF THE FRENCH EAST INDIA COMPANY
Résumé
The work in progress presented in this communication is the result of collaboration between historians and computer scientists whose goal was the digital reconstitution of an18th century French merchant ship of the Compagnie des Indes orientales. This ship has now disappeared and its reconstitution aims at understanding on board living conditions. Three distinct research laboratories have participated in this project so far. The first, a department of maritime history, worked on historical documents, especially the logbooks describing all traveling events of the ship. The second, a research laboratory in archaeology, archaeoscience, and history, proposed a 3D model of the ship based on the original naval architectural plans. The third, a computer science research laboratory, implemented a simulation of the ship sailing in virtual reality. This communication focuses on the reconstitution of the ship in virtual reality, aiming at restoring a realistic interactive naval simulation: the 3D model of the ship has been integrated in an ocean simulation, with a physical rendering of the buoyancy. The simulation allows a user to walk around on the ship, at a scale of 1:1, and even steer it through a natural interaction. Several characteristics of the simulation reinforce the sensation of being on board. The immersive simulation has allowed historians to embark on the merchant ship Le Boullongne and to better understand how life was organized on-board. It has also been presented at several public exhibitions, in CAVE-like structures and HMD. The virtual reconstitution of the ship was meant to provide the ASIALOG historians team with an additional tool for the understanding of sailing between Europe and Asia. Being positioned on a ship in scale-one enables maritime historians to appreciate living and working conditions in a small space, overpopulated and in perpetual movement. Is it a new practice of validation of the historical sources in a new application environment, involving historians’ own physical activities and their perceptions? Finally, the results of this experiment have exceeded expectations and raises epistemological questions about the relationship between history and the virtual reconstruction.