Maya Dejong undertaking a photogrammetry process for slow digitisation.
Digitising Martindale Hall
Authors: Jarrad Kowlessar, Ania Kotarba-Morley, Tully Barnett, Heather Burke
The ‘slow digitisation’ project uses new digital tools to recreate historic Martindale Hall and its artefacts in sophisticated graphical detail to support heritage conservation, increase public access and enhance education about the role of this stately home in shaping our understanding of the colonial past and its reverberations in the present.
Contemporary digital archaeological tools and methods offer innovative ways to capture and represent material culture. These methods help archaeologists to reconstruct and visualise landscapes, buildings, monuments and artefacts in the context of their surroundings.
For the Martindale Hall project, a team of archaeologists used aerial photography captured with a drone to reconstruct a 3D model of the house and surrounding property using a technique called photogrammetry (where objects and environments are measured and plotted based on photographs).
Photogrammetry was also used to create photorealistic models of selected objects that can be viewed in detail and manipulated virtually, creating an immersive interactive experience of these artefacts in their authentic context.
A 3D model of the Smoking Room was reconstructed from photos taken with a hand-held Nikon D3200 camera and 18 mm lens. The resulting model captured the interior, complete with historical objects in the same arrangement, allowing a digital visitor the same view as if they were in the room in person.
In the process of creating photorealistic models of Martindale Hall, the Smoking Room, the many objects inside the house, and the surrounding landscape, the project team experimented with new ways of visualising and interacting with these digital records.
The digital models from the drone- and ground-based photographs formed the basis of the 3D modelling and visualisation work undertaken at Flinders University’s virtual production facility, The Void. The Void combines motion capture, in-camera effects and other aspects of virtual production to render complex digitisation work on large LED screens.
Using the Unreal Engine (software used to make computer games), the team created a visually detailed virtual cultural landscape combining the many heritage features recorded. The engine’s processing capabilities allowed this vast collection of three-dimensional objects to be visualised together in a reconstructed arrangement that users can interact with in real time.
The final Unreal Engine scene was screened in The Void and explored in person using a game controller to position the camera at a range of locations throughout the digital landscape. The size of the Void facility allows the Smoking Room to be viewed in full scale, at its actual size.
The photogrammetry produced a detailed topographic model that shows the terrain of the property. The present-day landscape of Martindale Hall could be changed digitally to feature vegetation that would likely have been there at the time of the Hall’s construction.
Images of the Hall and coach house were taken from measurements of their length, width and height, while the Smoking Room interior and its contents are majestically reproduced in full visual detail that shows the location of objects and walls in relation to one another—unlike in photographs, where the viewer is only able to see part of a scene from a single vantage point.
The virtual tour makes Martindale accessible to everybody, from anywhere in the world.
In recent years, the development of cutting-edge 3D scanning and modelling techniques has revolutionised the process of digitising architectural structures and their contents. High-resolution interior scans, such as those performed at Martindale Hall, meticulously capture the intricate details of architectural elements, furnishings, artworks and artefacts, preserving them for future generations. These representations not only capture the physical place but also serve as repositories of cultural knowledge.
Through these digital platforms, people can engage with cultural landscapes and material culture in new ways, bridging geographical and temporal divides. Virtual exhibitions showcase tangible artefacts and also contextualise them within the broader cultural landscape to tell stories that resonate with the sense of place.
The dataset gathered through fieldwork and post-processing in The Void enables visitors to take a virtual tour of Martindale Hall. The virtual tour makes Martindale accessible to everybody, from anywhere in the world, and creates a protected and enduring record for future generations in the event of the destruction or change of use of the physical site. The technologies of The Void have created an immersive, high-definition display in a scale that accurately conveys the reality of the landscape. In 2024, during the History Festival program, the public was invited to an event held in The Void showcasing the digitisation work on Martindale Hall. Visitors were given headsets to see objects up close and turn them around to see the different angles.
3D modelling is a helpful tool for archaeologists because it builds a visual panorama, true to scale, of abstract data taken from measurements and graphs. Bringing measurement data together with the photographic, written and oral-history records, the digitisation of Martindale Hall also allows us to see features such as the glass house and rock garden in their original condition and locations. The Martindale digitisation project invites visitors into an immersive experience of the past—as if we were really there—reconstructed through a combination of contemporary recordings, historical documentation and land mapping.