Virtual and Augmented Reality instructor Allyson Cikor uses a virtual reality system to explore a dinosaur track site in the MD of Greenview. (Photo courtesy Lethbridge College, Rob Olson Photography)

By Justin Goulet

VR team at Lethbridge College brings new life to Alberta heritage site

Jan 16, 2022 | 6:10 AM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – The virtual reality team at Lethbridge College has helped bring an Alberta heritage site to life.

The Grande Cache Dinosaur Track site is located on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, northwest of Edmonton. It’s the only large-scale exposure of dinosaur tracks known in the whole country. An estimated 10,000 individual prints belonging to many different species of the extinct lizards who called the region home during the Cretaceous Period have been found at about 25 different sites in the area.

Visitors to the Grande Cache Tourism and Interpretive Centre in the MD of Greenview can now follow in these dinosaurs’’ footsteps, thanks to the hard work of researchers from Lethbridge College’s Spatial Technologies Applied Research and Training (START) initiative.

The tracks were preserved under layers of rock and remained undiscovered for over 90 million year until open-pit mining operations in the area stripped away rock layers to reveal them in the 1980s. The tracks are located on steeply angled cliff faces that are nearly impossible for the public to access.

Mike McCready, Lethbridge College’s President’s Applied Research Chair in Virtual and Augmented Reality said, “Grande Cache has this site with amazing tourism opportunities, but they can’t bring people to it because of logistical and safety concerns.”

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So, instead of people physically visiting the tracks, McCready and his team, which includes the college Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) instructor and researcher Allyson Cikor and VR/AR program graduate Benjamin Blackwell, are bringing the tracks to people.

Development assistant Jesze Kaszas stands beside the remote dino tracks site in the MD of Greenview. (Photo courtesy Lethbridge College)

Thanks to photogrammetry, they’ve captured close-up and detailed imagery of the dinosaur tracks. With that, the team has created an immersive VR experience combining 360-degree imagery, spatialized audio and guided narration that allows visitors to experience the tracks and hone their paleontology skills with virtual activities – all within the Grande Cache Tourism and Interpretive Centre.

NEXT STEPS

The next step for the exhibit will be to create an augmented reality piece developed by VR/AR student Alex Mayer. The augmented reality part of the project allows guests to see how the tracks were made by overlaying digital content over the real-world site using Snapchat filters.

A screen capture of the virtual reality dino tracks program. (Photo courtesy Lethbridge College)

Jenny Daubert, Tourism Supervisor for the MD of Greenview said, “the Walking with Dinosaurs VR/AR project is a very exciting opportunity to share this historical site with the public in a fun immersive learning experience.”

“The team from Lethbridge College is extremely talented, and they have exceeded my expectations in their ability to recreate the dinosaur track site.”

The project is funded in part through a $18,000 grant from the province’s Community and Regional Economic Support program. In June, McCready and Cikor presented the project to the VR/AR Global Summit 2021 – North America, and it received international attention for the team’s work.

Cikor noted that they had a number of people approach them to ask about using technology to digitally recreate other heritage sites.

More information about the Grande Cache Dinosaur Track site is available here.