Perth Voice Interactive

LOCAL history fan Dallas Robertson spends countless hours recreating Perth’s lost historic landscape in virtual reality.

After about 80 hours on his Xbox, he recently finished a virtual model of Government House in the computer game Minecraft, a wildly popular Lego-like game that lets players build anything they want.

He’s already fleshing out the surrounds with other historic buildings that once surrounded Government House and has plans to recreate Perth as it was in 1870.

“I wanted to feel what it was like to live around that time… to give a sense of what it’s like to live in early Perth, to see what it’s like to walk down St Georges Terrace and see how Government House looms, how the town hall would have been impressive and everything else was so small next to it,” he says.

Mr Robertson, who started the virtual Museum of Perth and helped found the bricks and mortar version in Grand Lane, says he hopes it’ll act as a portal to get kids interested in local history, and plans to use it as part of an exhibition at the museum.

He uses historic photographs, many by the famous early photographer AH Stone, to recreate the buildings: he used 60 to ensure he had Government House accurate from every angle. He’s even modelled an interior so you can wander through and see where the royal family might have stayed, overlooking St Georges Terrace.

“I’ve had to splice [the photos] together, sometimes I can only see one part of the building and have to use two or three different photos to put together what it looks like from the back or the side.

“I sit with my iPad on my lap, I can flick through the photos, zoom in on the details and recreate them.”

1870 was a good year for the project because that’s when the town hall was finished, and photos were taken from the top showing a radial view of the city. Not many photographers wanted to use precious film photographing the backs of buildings, but he’s been able to zoom in on the backgrounds of other pictures to recreate the rears inadvertently snapped in the frame.

Given the limitations of Minecraft (he’s working with big bulky blocks that make curved shapes tough), it’s impossible to get a 1:1 replication, and the bright colours of the game don’t quite gel with the old photos that show dust and weeds growing everywhere.

“It’s obviously a fairytale version of it and hyper-real digital copy of it, but it’s as close as you’re going to get without going into an ArchiMAD program,” he says, referring to the complex and expensive professional architectural software.

Along with getting kids interested, using Minecraft means anyone else who gets inspired to recreate their own little part of historic Perth can easily pick up the game and figure it out in a few minutes.

While this project’s ongoing, Mr Robertson’s next task is to tackle a far more modern building: “The City of Perth have commented [on Facebook] and liked my Government House creation, and said ‘why don’t you build the new Perth city library?’”

by DAVID BELL