From Laser Scanning to Virtual Reality: The Art and Science of Constructing a Thule Whalebone House

This paper will also focus on opportunities to use virtual reality (VR) technology as a laboratory for testing and presenting research alternatives in archaeology to college students and the public. During the last decade the development of laser scanning technology has created a new technique for capturing, preserving and analyzing objects, artifacts and sites. Using the reconstruction of a Thule whalebone house, issues of data translation, computer modeling and virtual world construction are considered. Finally, the advantages of advantages of different platforms for presenting 3D content as interactive worlds are also explored. Reconstruction of a Thule Whalebone House The reconstruction of a Thule whalebone house provides a good case study of the use of laser scanning on an object of complex geometry. Thule peoples are the cultural and biological ancestors of contemporary Inuit and Eskimo groups of the North American Arctic and Greenland. By the late 12 or early 13 century, Thule groups had expanded eastward from the Bering Strait region into the Canadian Arctic. Unlike northwestern Alaska, the coastlines of the Eastern Arctic were largely devoid of driftwood. Consequently, the main rooms, kitchen areas, and entrance tunnels of Thule winter houses were constructed from whalebone, which was used extensively within the roof framework. This roof framework was erected over a house pit furnished with a flagstone floor, raised sleeping platform, kitchen, and storage areas. The roof frame would have then been covered with hide and a thick layer of turf, moss and snow (Maxwell 1985:248; McGhee 1978:92,95). Archaeologists know little about how these enigmatic houses were constructed because few have ever been encountered intact. Consequently the possibility of reconstructing a three dimensional model of a Thule house from archaeological data held great promise for providing new insights into how these dwellings were constructed and used. The reconstruction process would have been difficult, if not impossible, to resolve using 2D drawings since manual drafting or 2D CAD cannot easily solve a 3D structural system based on the organic elements, such as the mandibles, cranium and maxillas of a whale. Physical models, however, offer an interesting environment for manually testing possible solutions, avoiding the need to create curvilinear forms from 2D drawings. Tracing the modeling process also provides an opportunity to address issues of workflow, revealing the limitations of commercially available software and hardware in data translation. Furthermore, we illustrate the testing of research hypotheses and include a review of the types of products created during the

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