Explorations in Time & Spaceproject
The obvious answer to the problem of vanished historical landscapes was recreating the building or landscape from photographs and floor plans in 3-D software but, having experimented with consumer 3-D software and discussed the project with 3-D specialists, I elected to use my time in other ways. Three-dimensional work requires more training and time than I was willing to commit, and the moderately-priced consumer software did not produce the kind of sophisticated results that I desired. And so the project languished until 1999 and appearance of MetaCreations Canoma 1.0 (acquired by Adobe only to vanish) and Bryce 4.1 (acquired by Corel and, most recently, by E-on Software).
Canoma was a software program that abstracted 3-D images from a single or multiple photographs, and Bryce is a terrain generator that creates geography and atmospheric environments. Although Bryce had appeared in the mid-1990s, its early results were more conducive to creating fantastic landscapes for gamers’ imaginary worlds rather than for historical scenes. Because Bryce could not create vegetation or complex soils and rocks, it could manage treeless western landscapes but not wooded New England vistas. Bryce 4.0, however, added trees, rocks, and better water rendering not to mention improved night atmospheric conditions. Bryce can also import freely available USGS data or DEMs, allowing a faithful reproduction of any mapped terrian.
I applied the Canoma and Bryce technology to recreating a site of an 1872 double axe murder to the “Murder on Smuttynose Island Murders.” For several years, State v. Wagner, the trial transcript of the murder constituted the one of the assignments in my graduate seminar, “The Methodology of Social History.” Over the years, I discovered that the students missed several crucial bits of evidence in the transcript because they could not “see” the island or recognize the crucial spatial relationships involved in the event. As a result, they could not ask the necessary questions of the text.
Although there are several points in the transcript in which spatial relationships are important, I wanted to test the validity of Maren Hontvet’s account, the only eyewitness testimony to the murder. Of particular interest was her testimony regarding her positive identification of the murderer. 
In court she claimed that the assailant was so close to her vantage point (at the window looking out onto the assailant) that she could touch him. As she spoke, according to the trial transcript, she reached out and touched the witness box railing. Was this identification possible? One of the few extant photographs provided some clue. By counting the number of clapboards and knowing that nineteenth century clapboard were six inches rather than the twentieth century five inches, it was possible to arrive at a rough estimate, suggesting there was some doubt about the Maren Hontvet’s ability to see the murderer clearly. The problem was determining the height of the foundation and the terrain immedately under the window. And a photograph was not equal to the task
To otain a better idea of the scene, I needed to have a better idea of the spatial relationships sketched out in Maren Hontvet’s testimony and those available in the photograph. The recreation proceeded in the following steps:
Reconstruct and edit the architectural details of the dwelling from an extant photograph, using Canoma and Photoshop. This primarily consisted of recreating the back of the house. Since the house’s design mirrored its existing twin, the Haley House and its ownfacade except for the doors, it was a matter of “reshingling” the backside of the house with the rubber stamp tool in Photoshop.
Adapt a grayscale image of the island from a USGS contour map in Photoshop and recreate the island in Bryce. Smuttynose Island is the long, horizontal island in the center of the island group, and Malaga Island is the very small island (actually connected to Smuttynose in the 1870s) directly to the east of Smuttynose. Louis Wagner would have to row from Portsmouth to the island.
Combine the Canoma house model and the Bryce terrain model in Bryce; add time of day and weather based on extant weather data.
Use the 3-D reconstruction to glean a better idea of the window problem as well as views of the general aspect of the island terrain. The problem became the exact nature of the foundation and pitch in the back of the house. Bryce rendered it as much more steep than it was likely to have been. Bryce did, however, capture the color of the rocks and the water at high tide (see below), illustrating how small the island was and how close the house was to the inlet.- Create a fly-through to furnish a general idea of the entire environment, weather on the night of the murder, and the context for the murder. Much more could have been done with the fly-by, including the addition of volumetic clouds, but rendering volumetic objects takes time. Even without the volumetric additions, the orginal 16-second QuickTime movie took 37 hours and 13 minutes on a Macintosh G3 with 256 MB of RAM at its disposal. (Double click to start the movie; click once to stop and start.)
