A team of students have won a prestigious competition after using videogame technology to turn historic maps and engravings from the British Library into a stunning 3D environment.
Pudding Lane Productions, a team of six second-year students from De Montfort University, Leicester, scooped first prize in the Off the Map challenge – a nationwide initiative sponsored by game developer Crytek and run in conjunction with the British Library and GameCity.
Their success was announced during a special event to showcase the best of the Off the Map entries as part of GameCity8, the annual festival of videogame culture currently being held in Nottingham (October 19 to October 26).
GameCity, a Nottingham Trent University project, is holding a series of special events, presentations and debates during the week, celebrating videogames and videogame culture.
The Pudding Lane Productions team’s three-dimensional fly-through of 17th century London impressed the judges with its realism and attention to detail, showing the tightly packed streets and lanes of the capital city.
Students from the universities and colleges were given few rules to follow, granting them the creative freedom they needed to adapt the maps from the British Library with Crytek’s CRYENGINE.
The primary objective of the competition was to inspire innovation among students and merge rich visual sources from the past with industry-leading technology.