Peterborough Chapter - Archaeological Virtual Reality

Speaker: Jeremy Brooks

Topic: Archaeological Virtual Reality

Jeremy Brooks (photo above) is a digital archaeologist and Anthropology MA candidate at Trent University, supervised by Dr James Conolly. He founded the tech start-up company, AVROD (Archaeological Virtual Reality Online Database) from his MA research project.

The seeds of this project were planted when Jeremy was unable to attend excavations at Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) due to the conflict in Syria. Instead, he attended a Neolithic (8000 year-old) field school in Bulgaria. It was during this time that he first imagined the idea of the “Excavation Realm” (which later became AVROD) as a solution for archaeologists and archaeology students to study archaeological sites remotely to avoid travelling to difficult and dangerous locations.

Jeremy created the NMVRP (Nassau Mills VR Project) as a case study for his MA thesis “The Applications of Virtual Reality for Archaeology”, focusing on the Trent University Ontario Archaeology field school excavations of 19th century milling site of Nassau Mills as a virtual digitization project.

Jeremy's skills and experience bridges media and technology with his passion for digital archaeology to better connect academic and public audiences to archaeological data through innovative educational technologies. Expansion plans are underway in collaboration with Trent University, Fleming College, the Innovation Cluster, and recently AWS (Amazon Web Services).