Virtual Vegas

A classic Las Vegas resort is no longer lost to the sands of time, thanks to collaboration between an Italian polytechnic university and UNLV.

The “Re-living Las Vegas” project, a virtual rendition of the Sands Hotel in its heyday-the 1950s and 1960s – is a collaboration between professors in UNLV’s entertainment engineering and design program, and Politecnico di Torino in Turin, Italy.

Ultimately, users will be able to explore the fully detailed virtual resort, interact with it and other visitors, attend significant events and shows and pull up historical facts about the resort.

Graduate students from Turin working at UNLV with faculty and UNLV Special Collections set the project in motion over the past three months.

Aniello De Santi, Marco Antognozzi and Marco Locatelli are the media and cinema engineering students from the Politecnico who worked on the project from September to November. They worked along with Daniel Cook and Joe Aldridge of the entertainment engineering and design program and Su Kim Chung of UNLV Special Collections to piece together the historical Las Vegas resort.

“We recreated three original Sands environments… the exterior with the big sign and the pool area, the casino gambling lobby and the Copa Room, the Sands Showroom,” said De Santi, speaking on behalf of the group.

The goal of the project is to create a new way of digitally preserving history.

“When it will be completed, with more material, more rooms, avatars and sounds, ‘Re-living Las Vegas’ will be the first ‘enhanced archive,’” De Santi said.

“The idea is taking the know-how we’re collecting with this pilot project and to adapt it to every archive, institutional or private, that wants to ‘enhance’ their archive too and show their material in a new way.”

According to De Santi, “Re-living Las Vegas” uses the C4 Engine to accomplish this, a technology that has been licensed as the backbone of several upcoming computer games.

Daniel Cook, coordinator of UNLV’s entertainment engineering and design program, said that “Re-living Las Vegas” shares some common ground with modern video games, but has the potential for much more.

“The idea is to push the use of technology to something more than first person shooters,” Cook said.

“You immerse yourself in environments and learn more than just where the grenades are.”

Cook added that the information added to “Re-Living Las Vegas” has the potential to be community driven, much like the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, but in 3D form.

“Think of it as Wiki 3.0,” he said, in reference to the “Web 2.0″ tagline applied to the modern World Wide Web.

Larry Mullen, associate professor of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism, researches virtual worlds and teaches a course about the popular “Second Life” at UNLV. Mullen is excited over the educational use of virtual environments in “Re-living Las Vegas.”

“It’s tricky. People are just now figuring out what to do. It’s nice to see a useful way of utilizing the medium though, for more than [sex and violence],” Mullen said. “Lots of people malign it, like any new medium.”

Despite how they’ve been used so far, interactive media have a potential to describe far more than verbal or written communication, Cook said.

“Think of describing a spiritual experience… [or] a dream,” Cook said. “How do you communicate that? Using [interactive media], you can walk in the dream environment or have someone else walk in that dream environment.”

The collaboration between the Politecnico and UNLV will make it possible to fully communicate the Sands experience, circa 1960.

“While entertainment engineering is the perfect mix between fine arts and mechanical engineering, we studied the perfect mix between fine arts and computer science,” De Santi said.

“The aim is the same- going creative with technologies, pushing them to unusual places and mixing languages. We can all call ourselves ‘Creative Engineers’”

In order to assemble an accurate virtual Sands, the group gathered resources from on the resort through UNLV Special Collections.

“In our three month stay at UNLV we scanned about 600 items: pictures, documents, letters, menus, we digitalized one hour of original 16mm video about the Sands, digitalized one hour fragments from the Special Collections’ Oral History Project,” De Santi said, adding that UNLV Special Collections played a very important role in the project.

“Without their materials and their help, there won’t be any ‘Re-living Las Vegas.’ And a special thanks to Su Kim Chung at Special Collections, she’s been our guardian angel.”

According to Cook, “Re-living Las Vegas” will someday be integrated with virtual and augmented reality technology that will take it away from the computer monitor and into real environments, such as coffee houses and enhanced museums.

There’s still much work to be done if “Re-living Las Vegas” is to reach this potential, however. Another set of Politechnico students is set to arrive in the spring and continue work on it and some finalized product is expected by the end of 2009.

“We’d need historical and archival experts, storytellers and screenwriters, computer science programmers, 3-D animation experts to create avatars, sound designer, set designers,” De Santi said.

“And everyone who has pictures or materials about the Sands is welcome to share it with us, they’ll [be] so helpful.”

Cook added that he hopes there is some interest in the project from local businesses to support the project further.

“We’d love to get one of the casinos involved,” Cook said. “How great would it be to have an environment, say, inside the Encore, where people can experience what the Frontier was like or the Golden Nugget, in a room that’s virtually enhanced?”