Project Campus - Overview, History and Goals

Welcome to the first blog post covering Project Campus, a pet project of mine that is designed to essentially create a digital double of the University of Lincoln Brayford campus as a fully explorable and interactive 3D space whereby students and visitors can walk around a virtual campus and find out about courses, facilities and more.

Built using Unreal 5 this project is a mammoth undertaking and whilst it would be wonderful to copy everything there are some spaces such as offices that won’t be copied for obvious reasons. Players will take on an avatar and explore the campus using lifts, stairs and doors as you would in real life. It also offers the advantage of being totally modular and adaptable.

Project Origins

The Project is one that has been milling around in my head for years starting life as a virtual student showcase gallery for degree shows but due to lack of support at the time this idea was put on hold until more recently. This virtual degree show (originally designed in 2016) was using Unreal 4.27. Covid brought back this idea and hence the idea grew and finally now into what is becoming Project Campus.

Degree show concept in 2016 using Unreal 4.27

So what changed?

The tools to capture, optimise and rebuild the campus have caught up with the ambition and as this project is being done with zero budget time and technology are the biggest slowing factors.

What is Goal of Project Campus?

The ultimate goal is to have a digital replica that could be used for open days, equipment and facility training and even as a social and fun digital space to showcase student work and achievements with a gamification element. Version 1 of Project Campus had to be scrapped and what is currently being built is a more accurate, in-depth and feature rich build that is more stable and optimised from the start.

Can I get involved?

Project Campus will need as much support as possible to be finished as at the time of writing this it is being done largely by myself in what little free and research time I may have working around my duties. As a project it would be great to get students to help digitally recreate, capture and help shape Project Campus. Email sfisher@lincoln.ac.uk to get involved.

Is there a demo available?

There will be a windows .exe demo available before Christmas 2024 which will only cover a small section of the campus focusing initially on ATB as this is the building in which myself and the Digital Aquarium resides within. So stay tuned.

The goal is to be creative, fun and functional and evolve and change overtime with plans to even have seasonal events and minigames as an option within the virtual campus. Ideally, it is a collaborative project that anyone can get involved in and contribute towards and can be scaled up or down as needed.