Have a Look Around: Virtual Tours and Virtual Reality on Almost Any Budget
- Jon Kozak, Central Connecticut State University
While nothing can replace an in-person visit, virtual reality can offer a meaningful alternative when a site is inaccessible for any number of reasons. Through immersive documentation, audiences can experience a specific location at a specific moment in time. Once expensive and technically complex to implement, this technology is now supported by affordable, off-the-shelf tools that make it possible to create immersive and accessible experiences. This session will examine when and where to deploy virtual reality effectively, and how to construct compelling narratives in 360 degrees.
The Mary Eliza Project: Using Computational Tools to Transform a Voter Registry to Public-Facing Programming
The Mary Eliza Project is a public history project that communicates the diverse stories of the women listed in Boston’s 1920 Women's New Voter Registries through public talks, a developing website, and social media. Using examples from the 600 Connecticut-born new voters present in the registries, a member of the project will discuss how the Mary Eliza Project uses Tableau Public to find trends and outliers among new voter demographics, in concert with publicly available historical records, to design programming addressing the possible motivations behind these women’s civic engagement. This paper will also explore the challenges of using this tool to create visualizations not only from this registry, but also from historical government registries in general.
Digitizing Cultural Heritage Through AI-Driven 3D Reconstruction: A NeRF and Gaussian Splatting Approach
- Ali Hussain, University of Genoa, Italy
Recent advances in AI-based 3D reconstruction offer new opportunities for cultural heritage preservation, accessibility, and research. This presentation introduces a practical and scalable workflow for converting 2D images of cultural artifacts, architectural elements, and historic spaces into high-fidelity 3D models using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Gaussian Splatting. As heritage institutions increasingly seek digital tools for documentation, education, and public engagement, these AI-powered techniques offer a low-cost, rapid, and highly photorealistic alternative to traditional photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning.
These presentations were given at the Connecticut Digital Humanities Conference in at the Elihu Burritt Library in New Britain, CT on March 19, 2026.
