Building Huys Hengelo in VRML
Dennis Reidsma , University of Twente, The Netherlands
Martin Kragtwijk , University of Twente, The Netherlands
Anton Nijholt , University of Twente, The Netherlands

Short Paper: Short Paper 2: 3D Worlds and Digital Environments

January 1646 some envoys of the then United Provinces of the Netherlands were on their way to Muenster to negotiate a Spanish-Netherlands peace treaty. They stayed a few nights in Huys Hengelo, a simple castle near the Dutch town Hengelo, not far from the German border. Little is known of this castle itself. Remnants of a simple wooden storage house from the 14th century have been found on the location of Huys Hengelo. This so-called 'spieker' has been rebuild a few times until the castle was build. Only a few drawings exist of the castle in its environment, unfortunately historians consider them as unreliable. Around the castle was a canal, there were bridges and a separate shed. In 1821 the castle was demolished and the area was used for industry buildings. During 1993-1995 these building were pulled down and the foundations of the castle were excavated. In this paper we report about our attempts to rebuild the spieker, the environment (including a draw-bridge, a shed and a gate) and the castle (including its interiors) using VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). The main issues we deal with are the unreliability of the sources, forcing us to show alternatives rather than 'the building as it was', the possibility to allow users to make changes and experiment with different geographies, animations showing how parts of the wooden buildings were constructed in reality, the interface with the user and, as this project started as a student project on request of local historians, some of our experiences with the co-operation between students and between (computer science) students and historians. [1] J.C. Roberts & N. Ryan. Alternative archaelogical representations within virtual worlds. In R.Bowden, (ed), Proceedings of the 4th UK Virtual Reality Specialist Interest Group Conference. ( Brunel University, November 1997):179-188.

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