Beacon Virtua - A Virtual Reality Simulation Detailing the Recent and Shipwreck History of Beacon Island

¹ Curtin University
² The University of Western Australia
³ Western Australia Museum

Beacon Virtua presents a simulation of Beacon Island to explain two periods of the island's history. Firstly, it shows the island as it was in 2013 - digitally preserving the state of the island when it housed a small fishing community. Secondly, it shows the legacy of the Batavia shipwreck in 1629, and the work done to excavate the skeletons left from that time. the paper will explain the various features used to simulate the island and tell its story and how the user interacts with the simulation. Beacon Virtua has been deployed to ten different hardware/software platforms offering considerable fexibility in how the simulation can be experienced. This project is part of the ARC Linkage Project "Shipwrecks of the Roaring Forties: A Maritime Archaeological Reassessment of some of Australia's Earliest Shipwrecks" (LP130100137).