Learn about the fundamentals of gothic architecture and the three most popular pillar orders by building them yourself in this interactive VR workshop!
A student Project by Philipp Petry and Jonathan Hüttmann
3. Semester, 2021
Supervisors: Thomas Hoger, Ingo Schäfer
Augmented and Virtual Reality Design
The Idea:
Our goal was to educate the user about gothic architecture in a fun and interactive way.
We realized this by having the setting be an old, gothic-style cathedral where the training is taking place. You can walk (teleport) around the cathedral and listen to a narrator, explaining some of the very fundamentals of gothic architecture to you.
The interactive part comes, when you go to the back of the cathedral. There are 3 tables filled with different parts of pillars. It is now your jobs to assemble the pillars in the correct order. The pillars are divided in the three most used pillar orders of gothic and anchient architecture. While the user is putting the pillars together they learn not only how its construced by doing it themselfs, but also about the historical background of each pillar by listening to a narration for each pillar.
Realization and Motive:
Learning pillar orders is dull and reading about architecture can also be rather boring for most people, so we decided to make it more entertaining by having the user walk through an anchient cathedral and construct their own pillars.
This experience can be seen as proof of concept for this kind of teaching. We realized that not only does it work and is immersive, but also is it fun! This method of learning by having the user make their own architectural pieces could be extended to different time periods and parts. Maybe, the user should even be able to piece together a whole cathedral from scratch and walk inside it afterwards.
This project was realited with the help of Thomas Hoger and Ingo Schäfer from 3Spin. They helped us with developing the concept and pushed us through technical difficulties we faced along the way.