The Akwesasne Museum & Cultural Center hired my small company ( MoniGarr.com LLC ) to create a brand new VR Exhibit that put visitors inside various Iroquois Longhouse Structures. I provided them (Sheree Bonaparte and Dave Fadden) with tech consultations to help them with their many decisions for project planning, budget, schedule, and tech equipment. I’m the founder of MoniGarr.com and lead software architect for this project.  I also hired a 3D graphic designer and drone operator to help me with this project.

I used 360 cameras to shoot photos & videos from inside the Saint Anicette QC Iroquois Village replica and Longhouses. I also brought a drone operator with me to the NY State Museum to capture some flyover video shots of their miniature Iroquois Village and Longhouse Replica indoors while I captured 360 images and videos of their dioramas, village, and replicas.

Next, I imported the images and video into my Unity3D project and wrote some standard C# Scripts to provide VR Locomotion & Navigation with the Oculus Go device. This Unity3D project required Oculus SDKs.  I also created a separate project to play a video of a player visiting each scene inside the Longhouse VR on a flat-screen inside the museum exhibit.

I hired a trusted graphic designer to receive images I took of an Iroquois basket and an Iroquois horn rattle. She used my images to create 3D replicas of the original art pieces that I imported into our Unity project.  Visitors can shake the rattle with the music (Bear Fox is the singer) while sitting inside a giant Iroquois basket (black ash & sweetgrass) on a platform out in the night time sky with many of the stars labeled.

I led the software testing with our internal team and with the Akwesasne Museum team to verify the navigation, menus, Kanien’keha audio and content were well received for the museum exhibit.

The Akwesasne Museum provided Kanien’keha audio (recorded by Akwesasne community members) and Bear Fox provided a beautiful Kanien’keha song that plays in the background of the first home scene in Longhouse VR.

You can view the Longhouse VR exhibit in Akwesasne http://akwesasneculturalcenter.org/