Virtual Reality Applications
360 panorama of the Siena “Government Frescoes” VR application with virtual scaffolding and numbered info-points
Fully Three-Dimensional
All of the architectural and art historical spaces are fully 3D, photorealistic digital scans of the real-world locations. This means that virtual visitors can move around the space just as in reality, stepping closer to an artwork to examine it in detail, or standing back to take in a panorama of the entire room or chapel.
Metrically Accurate
Because these spaces and places are unique and one-of-a-kind, it is extremely important that their digital duplicates be not only visually accurate, in terms of color and lighting, but also accurate in scale: each scan is accurate to ~2cm.
Improving on Reality
A visitor to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova will strain to make out the details of the elaborate fresco cycle rising some 40 feet above their head, and be pressed for time given the Chapel’s visit time-limit of 15 minutes.
The virtual reality application not only allows a user to spend as much time as they like, whenever they like, within the polychromed walls of the Chapel, but even permits them to “teleport" to the same level as the highest tiers of the frescoed scenes, and stand eye-to-eye with the characters populating the upper reaches of the Chapel’s walls.
classroom implementation
In 2017, I initiated a project to bring VR experiences of art- and architecture-historical spaces into the under/graduate art history classroom at Indiana University. The first iteration of the integration, in 2018, involved a hybrid approach of in-class use of webGL 3D models, and extracurricular use of the VR experiences, due to technological and logistical constraints. In 2021, the four VR applications are running on the Oculus Quest 2, with multi-user/social functionality, and available to be used in-class, during the traditional art history lecture class.
The Scenes
Giotto’s “Scrovegni Chapel”, Padova, Italy
Lorenzetti’s “Allegories of Good and Bad Government”; Siena, Italy
Masolino and Masaccio’s “Brancacci Chapel”, Florence, Italy
Piero della Francesca’s “Chapel of the True Cross”, Arezzo, Italy
The four scenes were chosen for both their importance to the history of Western Art, but also because they illustrate the chronological arc of Renaissance development of technique and style.