As the artist in residence for the Georgia Coast Atlas, I was asked to create a digital twin of Atlanta’s historic Oakland Cemetery in support of Historic Oakland Foundation's preservation efforts. Video-game quality reconstructions of historic sites have been a holy grail for digital humanities scholars and historians for decades now. I have been chasing this degree of photorealistic site reconstruction for many years.

Oakland is one of the largest greenspaces and oldest sites in Atlanta. I always loved video games as a kid, and imagined it as a cemetery video game a viewer could fly through like a bird. For years I've dreamed of creating worlds this immersive as an artist and animator. Scanning 70,000 gravesites over 48 acres took days of flying a camera drone over every foot of the grounds from multiple angles. I shot 12,000 photographs in the end. It turned out to be impossible to process the half terabyte of data I wound up with into a 3D model, at least with the photogrammetry tools available just a few years ago. I let the data sit and waited for the software to catch up. In 2026, advances in 3D Gaussian splatting and the arrival of agentic coding tools that can run on their own for weeks led me to try again. The resulting model is astonishingly complex, with 170 million "gaussian splats" (different photo elements) in it. Run through Unreal Engine, it produces the same cinematic look that has become standard for Hollywood films and shows like The Mandalorian, but is surely not commonplace for historic visualization of a public cemetery.