Current Team

Founding Student Team (UBC)

   Michael Griffin, Classics

   Jo McFetridge, Archaeology

   Dieter Buys, Computer Science

Developers (UBC):
    Dieter Buys - Senior Programmer / Lead Developer

    Simon Armstrong - Developer
    Glen Kociolek - Developer

Visual Content Engineers (UBC) :

    Matthew Pater
    Ilia Slobodov

History

Ancient Spaces has been student-driven from the beginning, and continually based on open-source software.  The idea for a student-built, "massively multiplayer" world based on classical antiquity was put forward by Michael Griffin, then an undergraduate student in UBC's Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies in January 2003, and an early version of the software was written in the open-source library CrystalSpace (focusing on the Palace of Minos at Knossos). In July 2003, a cross-disciplinary group of students drawn from Classics and Computer Science, all with ties to the Faculty of Arts’ Instructional Support and Information Technology (Arts ISIT) unit at the University of British Columbia initiated the project idea in 2004. The group consisted of three students: Michael Griffin, Dieter Buys, and Jo McFetridge, the co-founders of the project (see the team page). The current libraries for Ancient Spaces are also open-source, built on OGRE 3D: see the technology page for more.

January 2004:

Using a ‘mode’ of a gaming platform called Unreal Tournament 2004, thanks to support from the Arts ISIT Fund and CNERS, these students demonstrated that traditional gaming technology could be put to use to create a realistic and explorable 3D model of the ancient Athenian Acropolis). 

September 2004:

Beginning from this proof of concept, Ancient Spaces, with support from UBC's Teaching & Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF), piloted the project in a first year classical studies course, Classical Studies 100, at the University of British Columbia. A volunteer group of twenty classical studies students replaced their traditional essay with  an immersive 3D reconstruction of the ancient Athenian Agora, including major structures such as the fifth-century Temple of Hephaestus and the Tholos or Council-House, where many crucial decisions of the prototypical democracy were made.   The technical elements of the project were simple and 'backgrounded' so that the students requred little technical expertise .  Feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive.  Although the students had to spend more time creating a 3D reconstruction (with accompanying justifications) than a traditional essay, every one of the students expressed willingness to repeat the project if given the opportunity , and acknowledged that they preferred this mode of creative and constructive learning.

September 2005: 

With the support of a larger TLEF of $80,000, Ancient Spaces set out to develop their our own unique technology to allow any university to contribute content, and to ‘background’ the need for technical expertise still further.  Ancient Spaces, also, began to expand the range of areas to be modeled from Athens alone to Ancient Egypt,  British Columbia, and Machu Picchu, expanding the cultural range considerably.  This stage of the project is currently underway.

One of the key goals of the project is to produce technology comparable in quality to that which goes into the creation of computer games, but (1) free in the public domain and ‘open-source’, so that any academic or member of the public can edit it, and (2) designed for fully educational use , that puts the power in the hands of students.