Virtual-reality tour at IMAG takes you inside old Army fort that gave Fort Myers its name

You’re standing at the busy intersection of Hendry and Main streets in downtown Fort Myers. A glowing ball floats in the air in front of you.

Touch the ball, and suddenly modern Fort Myers disappears — the cars, the people, the restaurants, everything.

The last 161 years melt away. And then, almost miraculously, it’s 1856 and you’re standing inside the walls of Fort Myers — not the modern-day city, but the old U.S. Army fort that gave the city its name.

There’s a row of white soldiers’ tents. A guardhouse with a tower. A garden full of corn. An American flag flapping in the breeze high above you. And a lot more.

There are even chickens pecking the ground and a gator slowly cruising by on the nearby Caloosahatchee River.

It’s not magic, of course. It’s virtual reality.

 And Matt Johnson of IMAG History & Science Center hopes it helps Fort Myers history come to life for visitors to the museum.

“We are literally sending you to the fort — in a virtual world,” he says.

The museum’s new exhibit, “Virtual Fort Myers: The Past Meets the Present,” opened last week at IMAG in downtown Fort Myers. Johnson says it’s the first step toward using technology to make history more fun and immersive at the museum.

“Our goal is to take history and our exhibits and create new experiences around them,” says Johnson, executive director of the new museum combining the Imaginarium Science Center and the Southwest Florida Museum of History. “And we can do that through technology.”

MORE: First look at the new Imaginarium, now called IMAG

IMAG developed the exhibit with local design company d3 Creative Studio, which adapted technology it already uses for virtual-reality real-estate tours. The whole thing cost about $80,000 to create and build, including the high-end equipment, Johnson says.

To experience that virtual-reality world, museum visitors strap on one of three pairs of VR goggles with built-in headphones, and they’re transported to a detailed Fort Myers painstakingly recreated by a team of about 10 d3 and IMAG employees.

IMAG historian Jim Powers narrates as you move from modern Fort Myers to the old U.S. Army fort named after Abraham Myers, an officer who helped establish the fort in 1855 at the end of the Seminole Wars. The fort was abandoned in 1858, and then federal troops re-occupied it during the Civil War.

The three-minute virtual-reality tour answers two of the most common questions asked at the museum, Johnson says. “What is it that everybody wants to know? ‘Where is the Fort and who was Myers.’ Those are the big questions.”

The exhibit lets visitors move around the old fort and its various buildings, “touch” and interact with things (such as picking up logs and knocking over tin cups) and even catch the view from atop the guardhouse tower, including a graveyard, a pier and a steamboat moving along the river.

The exhibit’s three booths are each outfitted with top-of-the-line Oculus Rift virtual-reality goggles, infrared motion sensors and television screens — not for you, but so people not wearing the goggles can see you move around that virtual-reality world.

Instead of using remote controls, the booths use those sensors to track your movement. The sensors read where your hands are and what they’re doing at any given moment.

“We were trying to create an experience that’s immersive but easy to use,” says Anthony DeBono III, owner and founder of d3 Creative Studio. “Getting rid of the controllers got rid of a big learning curve. Being able to use your hands is more natural.”

DeBono hopes the experience is as enlightening for museum visitors as it was for him.

“I grew up here and I never really understood what Fort Myers was,” he says. “You drive through downtown and you see the railroad station, and that’s it.”

Now DeBono and his creative team are experts on the subject.

It wasn’t easy recreating that 1856 fort, though. There weren’t any photos of the place. In fact, they had just three sources of information: A newspaper sketch of the guardhouse, a site plan that showed the placement of the buildings and — most importantly — a handwritten report from a Tampa quartermaster sent to investigate spending at the Army fort.

Johnson admits this might not be exactly how the fort actually looked, but it’s the closest they could get with the lnformation they have.

 “We had to take some artistic license,” Johnson says. “It’s piecing it back together.”

Johnson and DeBono say it was exciting watching the project come together over the last five months. They first started talking about it last year at a Christmas party.

“We talked about how cool it would be if we recreated Fort Myers,” DeBono says. “Matt was really excited about it.”

They’re not done, either. IMAG and d3 plan to keep adding to the exhibit in the coming months, including possible virtual-reality visits to the Battle of Fort Myers and a Calusa village.

On top of that, IMAG is debuting a new app for smartphones this week. The app does several things, including an augmented-reality feature that helps some of the museum’s coolest fossils come to life. Just aim your phone’s camera at the museum’s T. Rex and mammoth skeletons, and animated flesh suddenly appears on their bones on your camera screen.

And who knows what’s coming next? IMAG and d3 are already thinking about more projects for the near future.

“We’re just scratching the surface,” DeBono says.

Connect with this reporter:Charles Runnells (News-Press) (Facebook), @charlesrunnells (Twitter), @crunnells1 (Instagram)

If you go

What: IMAG History & Science Center, 2000 Cranford Ave., downtown Fort Myers

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday

Admission: $12 ($8 for students with ID, $10 for seniors, free for ages 2 and younger)

Info: 243-0043 or theIMAG.org