The smell of ozone and old paper filled the Great Hall this week as the academic year culminated in the unveiling of “Project Phoenix,” a seminal collaboration between the History Department and the Computer Science Faculty.
For the past six months, students have been working to digitally reconstruct the city of Turku as it stood on the morning of September 4, 1827—mere hours before the catastrophic Great Fire that would reduce 75% of the city to ash. The result is not merely a 3D map, but an immersive Virtual Reality environment that allows users to walk the cobblestones of the lost medieval quarter.
Archival Dust Meets Digital Polygons
The project demanded a duality of skills. Under the guidance of Senior History Lecturer Dr. Helena Varty, students spent the dark winter months in the provincial archives, deciphering handwritten Swedish land registries and fire insurance maps.
“The students initially found the archival work tedious,” Dr. Varty admitted. “Reading faded 19th-century cursive is not as instantly gratifying as writing code. However, they soon realised that you cannot code a reality you do not understand. They had to become detectives, piecing together the width of a street or the height of a merchant’s roof from fragmented tax records.”
The ‘Uncanny Valley’ of History
Once the data was harvested, the [CS-ADV] Computer Science stream, supervised by Dr. Elias Korhonen, took over to render the environment. This phase encountered a significant philosophical hurdle known as the “sanitisation problem.”
By early May, the beta version of the simulation was technically perfect but historically dishonest. The rendering engine had created a pristine, sunlit city with clean textures and perfect geometry. It looked, in the words of student lead Joonas Mäkinen, “like a theme park, not a pre-industrial port city.”
“We hit a wall,” Joonas explained. “The frame rate was high, but the atmosphere was dead. We went back to the primary sources—the diaries of travelers from the 1820s. They described Turku not as clean, but as crowded, muddy, and smelling of tar and livestock. We realised our code was too sterile.”
Coding the ‘Dirt’
In a frantic final sprint, the team had to write custom shaders to introduce “digital imperfection.” They added layers of mud to the street textures, darkened the ambient lighting to reflect the reliance on tallow candles, and even introduced a volumetric fog to simulate the smoke from wood-burning stoves.
The debate over these additions was heated. The coding team worried that the extra particle effects would crash the server (which happened twice during the dress rehearsal), while the historians argued that without the “grime,” the project was a fantasy.
The Exhibition
The final build, presented to parents and local historians on Tuesday, was a triumph of compromise. Wearing VR headsets, visitors were able to stand on the digital Old Great Square. The experience was purposefully disorienting; the streets were narrow, the buildings looming, and the sense of claustrophobia gave a terrifying context to how quickly the fire would have spread.
A Legacy of Learning
As the students pack their lockers for the summer break, “Project Phoenix” will remain hosted on the college’s local servers. It serves as a permanent reminder of the Virtanen ethos: that technology is most powerful when it is subservient to the human story.
“We often teach history as a list of dates,” concluded Dr. Varty. “This term, we taught it as a place. And for a moment, before the fire took it, the students made it real again.”
Leave a Reply