Digitally rebuilding precolonial African sites...

Bunce Island is a small (502.9 meter by 106.7 meter) island located upriver from Freetown in the country of Sierra Leone. Despite its size, its location roughly where the broad Sierra Leone River grows shallow made it an ideal spot for slave vessels to anchor safely, sheltered from the Atlantic by the larger Tasso Island while maintaining access to the complex river system of the interior and the slave trade there. This site saw 148000 enslaved Africans embarked, primarily at Bunce Island's slave fortress.

We are delighted to introduce our new project, which is focused on digitally rebuilding Bunce Island and the present-day ruins. Through a narrative structure, the users will be guided through an immersive digital experience to learn more about the complex history which took place here. We are developing this virtual simulation within Unreal Engine, harnessing the power of RealityCapture and MetaHuman Creator to build a hyper-realistic and immersive learning environment for students and the general public to discover more about the precolonial African past of Sierra Leone estuary.