St. Augustine Forts in VR extends an earlier virtual reality recreation of Castillo de San Marcos into a connected, two-fort historical experience spanning St. Augustine’s colonial defenses. Sponsored by Dr. Amy Giroux and Dr. Brook Miller, this team built on the existing Fort Marion VR project to bring its sister fortification—Fort Matanzas—into the virtual world, along with the historic Matanzas River that links the two sites. Visitors can now journey between the forts much as people once did: by boarding a virtual rowboat and traveling down a reconstruction of the river as it appeared before 1865, with the landscape rendered to obscure and then reveal each fort in turn. Alongside modeling Fort Matanzas, its towers and interiors, and the surrounding terrain, the team worked to restore and refine the inherited project—fixing camera-height and teleportation bugs, removing unused assets, and optimizing the experience to run smoothly at 90 frames per second on the Quest 2 headset. The result moves the project toward a richer, more complete portrait of St. Augustine’s military history, letting users not just visit a single fort but travel the waterway that once connected a coastal defensive system—all from inside a VR headset.
