Back to the future: see how digital tech brings our ancient origins to life
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Virtual reality (VR) is no longer something reserved for sci-fi movies and avid gamers. Thanks to the Origins Centre’s VR experience, you can enter a simulated cave or rock shelter, explore its depths and see rock art that looks so lifelike and vivid, you’ll want to reach out and touch it.
For a digital overview of what the Origins Centre is all about – or even if you just fancy putting on those cool goggles (also called headsets) and setting off on an interactive journey to discover the story of what makes us human – the museum’s VR exhibit is just the ticket.
The multimedia VR content was initiated in 2017 by the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct at Wits, thanks to a donation by the Tshimologong head at the time, Professor Barry Dwolatzky, and a grant from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Dr Tammy Hodgskiss, now the curator of the Origins Centre, helped develop the content for the VR experience in collaboration with fellow researcher Lara Mallen. She believes it is an invaluable resource for scholars, students and anyone looking for an immersive snapshot of the art, tools and fossils that combine to form a fascinating picture of humankind’s development over hundreds of thousands of years. As such, it is the perfect “taster” or precursor to a full museum visit or tour.
“It gives people a bit of detail about our origins, as well as about archaeology and palaeontology in South Africa,” she says. “We’ve taken the headsets onto campus and to science festivals where we’ve had a good response from students and learners, who enjoy the hype around the new technology and the strange out-of-body feeling. The technology is easy to use and navigate, and a bonus is that people who wear glasses don’t need to take them off to use the VR headsets.”
In addition to taking viewers on a mini-tour of the Origins Centre’s exhibits, on-site souvenir shop and coffee shop, the VR footage touches on Wits’ rich reservoir of research history. It draws on the expertise of the university’s Rock Art Research Institute, its Evolutionary Studies Institute, and its School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies.
Choose from a menu of options that includes incredible 360-degree high-resolution footage of the Storm Shelter San rock art site in the southern Drakensberg mountains; or take a virtual stroll through Blombos Cave in the Southern Cape to witness its Middle Stone Age engravings, said to be humankind’s oldest known artworks, as well as its paint-making kits dating back some 100 000 years.
To an ambient soundtrack of indigenous sounds composed by acclaimed musician Jill Richards and performed by versatile multi-instrumentalist Mpho Molikeng, wander through the fossil-rich Rising Star cave system in the Cradle of Humankind, learn about human evolution, and see how our ancestors ground ochre into pigment to create the artworks that still adorn our caves and shelters today.
The Origins Centre’s VR production offers a rich experience that uses futuristic digital technology to go back in time and bring the fascinating human origins story to life. To find out more about this great educational tool, email bookings.origins@wits.ac.za, or read more about this incredible exhibit on the Origins website and on The Conversation.